Dissonance

An Awkward Dance With the Other

Matthew Herbert's «One Pig» album between Sound Art and Pop Culture

Bastian Zimmermann
Matthew Herbert's album One Pig (2011) is based on sound recordings of a pig's life, including its slaughter and consumption. Herbert ostensibly composes a pop-cultural narrative, a chronology of the events of birth, life, death and even mourning. Yet at the same time Herbert thematizes the creative process of this music in the sense of a meta-narration – in other words, a pop-music construction of a narrative of a pig's life. The processes taking place between the diegetic sound-space of the recordings and the extreme functionalization of sounds on the album (processes that consistently exist in a borderline state) cast new light on the possible dimensions of an artist’s manipulation of sound.

by moxi