Matthew Herbert One Pig, FutureEverything 2012

FutureEverything confirm Matthew Herbert’s spectacular One Pig show, a performance that follows the life of a pig from birth to dinner plate

Matthew Herbert’s One Pig will be performed live on Friday 18th May at RNCM as part of the 2012 FutureEverything festival. The avant-garde musician has created an electronica album that captures the sounds of an anonymous pig’s life on a Kent farm, through to its death at an abattoir, and the consumption of the meat at a banquet hosted in its honour.

This controversial work utilised the pig’s meat, which was turned into musical instruments (and was prepared by Heston Blumenthal) – bunting and tablecloths were made from the blood, the fat became candles, trotters a candelabra, and the pig’s farmyard oinks were recorded and sampled as part of the score.

One Pig debuted at the Royal Opera House in October on a stage filled with hay bales and musicians in white butchers’ coats. A new instrument, designed by Yann Seznec, called a ‘styharp’ was commissioned as part of the project, and will be played live alongside a chef that cooks bacon, onstage, as part of the performance in Manchester.

Matthew Herbert released One Pig in 2011. The album, made entirely from recordings of a modern pig’s life cycle, aimed to listen in on a single farm animal’s life in the context of an otherwise-anonymous food chain. The project generated controversy as PETA condemned One Pig as making “entertainment” from animal cruelty, apparently without first checking key details about Herbert’s intention and methods. Herbert discussed the ideas and approach to One Pig with PETA’s Jobst Eggert in this interview.

Herbert has previously written scores inspired by packets of crisps, human hair, and has pioneered the use of so-called ‘real’, ‘ordinary’ or ‘found’ sounds in modern electronic music. On 2005′s Plat du Jour he recorded music beneath the sewers of fleet street, inside industrial chicken farms, used Vietnamese coffee beans as instruments and once drove a tank over a recreation of the dinner that Nigella Lawson cooked for George Bush and Tony Blair. He also recorded 3500 people biting an apple at the same time.



“Cacophonous explosions, raw sheets of electronic noise and a menacing barrage of percussion gelled into a plausible soundtrack for porcine doomsday… a rare performance that impales you on the prongs of a moral pitchfork.” – The Telegraph

“It’s a fascinating journey forcing us to regard the politics of our food. Could or would anyone else produce this work? No chance, and that’s the beauty of a Herbert recording. Gloriously unique and unsettling provocative. 10/10.” – Clash Magazine

Matthew HerbertOne Pig