How To Make Music From A Boat Full Of Migrants Or A Bowl Of Fruit

“I’ve been so impressed with this revolutionary documentary approach to creating music – using pigs or toilet rolls or chocolate bars"

So, Herbert used drum machines to author dancefloor-friendly songs. “I’ve been so impressed with this revolutionary documentary approach to creating music – using pigs or toilet rolls or chocolate bars or whatever it is – that I’ve been forgetting to make music that is purely emotional, where old tools are used just to make you feel something. In some ways, it feels like cheating: if I can make an album out of the sound of a boat full of migrants sinking off the coast of Italy or a bowl of fruit salad, why would I just sit down at a piano?”

In this one conversation, Herbert espouses countless quotable notions: comparing iTunes to fascism (“You deny the context in which something was made, and recontextualise it to fit only into forwarding your agenda”), lamenting setting up record label Accidental (“Labels, these days, are a mug’s game: there’s no money to be made there, only to be lost”), his crossover endeavours (“In the opera or the theatre, no one knows me from my DJ sets, to them I’m no one”) and the desperate commodity-trading of the digital era (“Advertising is everywhere, but now people are behaving more like adverts: they all want to sell you something, even if it’s only themselves”). But he saves his most apt metaphor to describe how it feels to release an album in 2015. “[It] feels like joining a motorway at rush hour. You hurtle onto the on-ramp as fast as you can, desperately trying to get up to the same speed as everyone else, and there’s innumerable commuters jostling for the same space. And you only have a certain amount of fuel – the cash behind your release, the assets, the videos, whatever – then, once it’s run out, you have to get off the motorway as quick as you can, and it just keeps trundling on without you. It feels so much more ruthless than it did even only a few years ago, and it’s not about to change soon.”