Root + Bone: Matthew Herbert's Edible Sounds
“The first thing I want to do is make people listen more carefully to the world – that’s my overriding principle for everything I do.” This was British electronic musician Matthew Herbert’s chief concern as he prepared for a one-off conceptual performance, Edible Sound, at The Guy’s Chapel near London Bridge last month.
The artist and composer takes sound from everyday items to produce his music. For this project, commissioned by Science Gallery London as the finale of their season FED UP: The Future of Food, he laser-etched ingredients widely used in processed food to produce an edible vinyl, played, then consumed by the audience on the night.
The piece explores processes of food production, consumption, waste and nutrition, and demonstrates the possibilities of creating and cultivating our own food at home. Aside from finding alternate uses for all that is edible, Edible Sound raises questions on the impact certain foods can have on our bodies and the world around us and explores themes like sugar addiction, food manufacturing and global warming.
“This has been an ongoing exploration, a process of listening to the stories behind food. I’m really interested in the transformation of food itself and this project is a development and deviation of that. If we can hear food and see it in a different way, maybe we can eat less of it or change our habits, make some discoveries along the way.
“There’s a real issue with food at the moment which is that we know it’s bad for us but we can’t stop eating it. We all do it. I’m personally interested in finding out how I can stop myself eating quite so much sugar. It’s constantly made easy for us to make the wrong decision.”
Britain’s recently-announced sugar tax highlights our troubled relationship with the substance, and to Herbert, it’s the defining story of our time. “This is a substance that’s incredibly harmful to us taken in the kind of quantities that we routinely consume, and it’s hidden in everything. Something like 40 percent of our diet contains sugar, and 400 years ago refined sugar didn’t exist.
For Edible Sound, Herbert made records out of different foods, like Coca Cola, Bacardi Breezers and sweet chilli sauce. Each one was so fragile that they were designed to be played only in one sitting, before their destruction by audience members. The musician is also planning to create fruit and vegetable records to see if there’s such a thing as “unhealthy listening”.
“I like the idea that embedded somewhere in these recordings are facts and info – trying to decipher them is tricky. But in a way, that’s a useful metaphor for how tricky it is to navigate the food systems that we have created. It’s hard to make sense and think clearly through all the clutter and the jargon, all the bollocks that we’re fed by food companies whose primary motivation is profit not health,” he says.
It’s not all doom and gloom though; when asked whether he thinks there is a future for the food industry or whether we’ve permanently lost our way, Matthew is surprisingly optimistic.
“I think we can go back, and we may have to – as the climate changes, food scarcity will become an issue. It won’t take much to design another system, there just needs to be a collective will. One of the big subsidies for the British sugar industry comes from the EU and if Nigel Farage has his way and we exit, those subsidies will come to an end and sugar may suddenly go up in value.
“Our bad diets are having a colossally bad effect on the NHS, we can’t keep fixing people and yet at the same time subsidise cheap food. At the end of the day, we can’t just keep eating as much as want, all the time, it’s just not sustainable. There just isn’t enough space on the planet, and if we don’t change, the planet will change us.”
Edible records: they’re surely a means of making us question our personal relationships with food, if not an answer to the food industry crisis. In Herbert’s own words while "playable on a normal hifi”, they’re “unlikely to be delicious”.
