Challenging his considerable legacy with one of his most extraordinary projects to date, celebrated British artist, producer, composer and experimentalist Matthew Herbert presents The Horse. Based around a full-size horse skeleton and working alongside the London Contemporary Orchestra and an expansive cast of special collaborators, this is Herbert in full flight, restlessly curious and culminating in starkly original, ritualistic music loaded with intent.
The project started with a search for the largest possible animal skeleton to explore sonically. More than a raw sound source, the horse skeleton Herbert acquired soon revealed different angles of inspiration. One of the major narrative arcs through the album is its representation of the evolution of human music itself, opening in a compelling, primitive flurry of custom-made flutes from the horse’s thigh bones and bows crafted from ribs and horse hair. By the mid-section you can hear a ritualistic twang of raw string (from a gut string stretched over the pelvis) give way to sustained compositional suites before crescendoing in a fierce electronic-acoustic fusion as grandiose as it is propulsive. The musical range covered on the album speaks to Herbert’s extensive experience across electronic, contemporary classical and jazz - a daring and constantly compelling collection of compositions.
Equally, the subject of the horse itself and its significance in human history became a vital focus for the music. Material came from myriad sources, including site specific work such as recording reverb impulses in front of ancient cave paintings of horses in Northern Spain and capturing sound at the corner of Epsom race course where women’s suffrage activist Emily Davison was trampled by King George V’s racehorse in 1913. Over 6900 horse sounds were taken from the internet, horse skin drums were found and played and a shaker was even fashioned from a mixture of cement and polo horse semen. Instrument makers such as Sam Underwood, Graham Dunning, Henry Dagg and Lee Patterson were commissioned to approach parts of the skeleton in different ways, some creating mechanical percussive instruments and carving out the aforementioned bone flutes, others blowing tiny air bubbles through the neck vertebrae.
As well as the consistent presence of the LCO, The Horse features contributions from world-leading soloists across generations, including Sons of Kemet’s Shabaka Hutchings and Theon Cross, Evan Parker, regular Wayne Shorter collaborator Danilo Pérez, Polar Bear’s Seb Rochford and Kokoroko’s Edward Wakili-Hick. Additional sound design work was carried out by Rana Eid in Beirut and Ella Kay in Manchester. Their respective instrumental and textural touches fold in on the work of the London Contemporary Orchestra, a collective celebrated for their unusual and extended playing techniques and regularly called upon by Jonny Greenwood, Thom Yorke and others. On this record they particularly worked with immediacy, recording raw samples in one session and then playing along to themselves in the next, creating a circular composition style against the grain of classical convention.
While staying true to Herbert’s storied legacy in thoughtful, experimental music, the scope of The Horse is even broader than his past work. For all the many streams of input and styles reaching from classical minimalism to vibrant, organic techno, it’s a focused album crafted to be experienced as a whole body of work in one sitting, and yet each sound comes loaded with Herbert’s inquisitive purpose. The sonic onus is on the work of the collective and their unlikely muse, and the result is a living, breathing exercise which veritably brings this unknown horse back to life.
