the latest record by matthew herbert is called plat du jour and its all about food and unhealthy eating habits. to produce it herbert used sounds he recorded during his visits to a chicken farm and to the london sewers. on the accompaning webiste platdujour.co.uk there is a lengthy text explaining the reasons for the record:
Ever since being fortunate enough to travel the world with my music, my palate has changed. The familiar English rituals, textures and tastes have been undermined at every turn. The inevitable consequence has been a growing obsession with the international language of food and how almost every choice we are being asked to make about what we eat is laced with deadly compromises. For example, at a restaurant, do you choose white bread, which may be nutritionally poorer for you than brown bread – or do you choose brown bread which contains 5 times the amount of pesticide residues?
[…]
We have handed over control of what goes in to our bodies to faceless transnational companies, operating in a geographical no-man’s land. It is no surprise then that world health is in crisis, with over-eating in the west becoming more of a problem than under-eating. In America, children have a lower life expectancy than their parents. And yet, the American template for modern food has long been at the front line of its empirical ambitions: McDonalds went to russia long before the tourists did; Starbucks has been successful in many countries previously thought impervious to its homogenised view of coffee; the hamburger, designed in part by a man who thought vegetables were to be avoided, is now a staple part of so many global menus.
ok, so this does read more like a political manifesto than a record description. but i think it’s great, innit?
this is not the first political record matthew herbert has produced. already the mechanics of destruction was a record with a clear anti-corporation message, one that herbert had released under his monicker radio boy and distributed for free.
but i think, it’s even braver to now release plat du jour under his much better known real name. right on!
there is also a great further reading and link list on the plat du jour website. unfortunately i have not found any sound teasers and my web connection is down… so i can’t dig around for them too much.
edit: oh. the record will be released in july only. there will be a downloadable version on the website for 5 quid. sounds good to me…