Exclusive – advance preview of a track from Matthew Herbert’s rock-ing new Wishmountain album
It doesn’t get more underground than this
Matthew Hebert is a man of many talents. Some know him for the irresistible, crunchy house music he makes for his own, much respected Accidental Records label. Others will have noticed him co-ordinating the monumental stand that was The Matthew Herbert Brexit Big Band, an orchestra ultimately encompassing 1,000 European musicians who performed music around the theme of Brexit who, among other noble acts, often destroyed hundreds of copies of The Daily Mail on stage every night.
Follow his career right back to its beginnings in the mid 90s and you’ll find Wishmountain, a project that injected the fun back into sampling and found sound. In the studio, he turned royal weddings and Formula One races into mesmerising, often hilarious loopfests. Live, he might loop up the sounds of cracking eggs and clanking pans as he cooked up an omelette, handing out slices to the front row as the track reached its end.
“It’s almost too painfully on the nose to make an underground record, er…. underground, but here we are,” Herbert tells us on the eve of the release of a new Wishmountain album, Stonework: 1000 Metres Down.
Sharing one of the album’s ten tracks exclusively with us before its release on Friday – the ultra-groovy ‘Dig’ – he said: “Wishmountain records are all made the same way, eight sounds from a single source, designed to be played in clubs.
“I still like the simplicity of this format as it pushes you to find new ways to create space and interest with so few ingredients. There’s something really poignant about hearing sounds from extreme places as the human toll on the regular environment becomes more and more pronounced and of course from rocks and geology billions of years old. A timely reminder that even the Tories won’t be with us forever.”
Like 1999’s Wishmountainisdead and 2012’s Tesco, this new album revolves around a specific, material sound palette, a sample library created as a commission for the Stone Techno festival, which took place at the UNESCO World Heritage Zollverein mine in Essen, Germany.
You can hear snippets of the whole album here:
To pre-order your copy of ‘Stonework – 1000 Metres Down’, click here