Album Review: Matthew Herbert – The End of Silence
Ras Lanuf, Libya, 11th March 2011. A battle is being fought. This is the starting point for Matthew Herbert’s gripping work of sound art, The End of Silence. Herbert uses an auditory fragment of this event, a momentary recording made by photographer Sebastian Meyer, as the point of origin for a sonic experience that lasts almost an hour. In the six brief seconds that make up Meyer’s recording we hear what has been identified as a pro-Gadaffi plane overhead, followed by a whistle, shouting, gunfire – and a bomb detonating. These sounds are extracted, fragmented, repeated, warped, distorted and ultimately weaved into tissue of rhythm and static which expands this crystallised moment of history, allowing us to step inside the experience of battle, to taste the fear, to feel the panic, and to acknowledge the awesome, evocative power of sound.
The original recording bookends the work: opening ‘Part 1’ and closing ‘Part 3’. After the bomb detonates at the opening of the former, electronic echoes pan across the track, reverberating like the aftermath of a bomb blast in your ears; although, as they continue to resound, they mysteriously mutate and seem closer to whale song heard through a hydrophone. These suspended moments of delicacy and curiosity are suddenly shattered by intense bursts of radio static. Herbert continuously disorientates you in this way; the sounds are never quite what they appear to be. In ‘Part 3’, the low, rumbling melody, a sound resembling an organ, has an almost jazz-like inflection as it bends between semi-tones. Yet this too was actually made from plundering and modifying Meyer’s violent recording.
In the middle of these two longer segments, which both hover around the 20-minute mark, lies ‘Part 2’, a ten-minute interlude that constitutes nothing less than an auditory assault. The sound of the bomb blast is juxtaposed with birdsong, recorded by what Herbert terms “witness mics” that were placed outside the rural studio where he recorded the piece. Birdsong becomes one of the most powerful motifs in the entire work, marking the uneasy juxtaposition between trauma and tranquillity, between what is lived through and what is listened to – and if you want to be really grandiose, between experience and art.
In comparison to other works of art music based on atrocity, say Steve Reich‘s ‘WTC 9/11’, The End of Silence is less melodic and uses no verbal testimony. All you’re left with is noise. There is no denying that this makes the album an incredibly difficult listen, but that’s what makes it capable of filling gallery spaces. That’s what makes it unforgettable.
– Katherine Travers
The End of Silence is available now on Accidental.
