‘We made horse semen into little shakers’: the quest for music’s most extreme sounds
‘I didn’t shoot a horse to make this record,” clarifies Matthew Herbert. “I just scoured for sounds of horses being shot and having sex … although that did get me into slightly dodgy internet territory.”
The experimental electronic musician and artist may not have slain a horse for his latest record, The Horse, but he did use a skeleton of one. “I found [it] on eBay and it only had a day left,” he recalls. “So I had to make a decision really quickly whether to go for it.” He went for it. “Then I realised I’ve got a dead horse in the corner of my studio,” he laughs. “I didn’t have the space to assemble it, I didn’t know what I was doing, it smelt a bit, so I left it there for a couple of weeks.”
Initially he was stumped: “How can I make music from it?” He started by having a bone turned into a flute. “Bone flutes are some of the earliest instruments that humans made,” he says. “So I started thinking: I’m now at the very origins of music and can tell a story from there.” A concept began to take shape: bringing a horse back to life through music.
He began to commission more unique instruments and implement unusual recording techniques. He utilised thigh-bone flutes, bows crafted from ribs and horse hair, a gut string stretched over the pelvis. He recorded in ancient caves in Spain that contained horse paintings, and captured the sounds at Epsom racecourse where Emily Davison was trampled to death. He even bought some high-grade polo horse semen to use. “I got the semen but didn’t know what to do with it,” he says. “I found somebody on Etsy that makes semen jewellery - she mixes it with clay and things. So we got the semen made into little balls I could use as shakers.”
So what does a record made from dead animal bones, semen ordered out of the back of a horse mag and almost 7,000 samples of horse-related activity – including them being murdered and copulating – sound like? Well, there are definitely tracks on The Horse that would have you swiftly booted out of any dinner party if you played it: the sounds of crunching, rattling bones, twittering thigh flutes, and the grumbling drones that begin the album certainly veer towards the challenging. However, as the album gathers pace – and the horse begins to come alive – it becomes more musical, spanning jazz, classical, even offering up some genuinely infectious percussive pieces of minimal dance music.
Herbert has form when it comes to making music from unconventional sources. 2011’s One Pig recorded the lifespan of a pig from birth to death to being eaten. He once recorded a tree for a week, as well as capturing the sound of 20,000 chickens before they became fast food fodder. He even created an album made exclusively from sounds recorded from the 10 best-selling items in Tesco – if glitchy electronic music made with bread, bog roll and Lucozade is your kinda thing.
He’s not alone in his appetite to push concepts, recording techniques and bizarre instrumentation to the extreme. German outfit Einstürzende Neubauten have spent years pilfering building sites to make music with drills and whatever else they could steal. Electronic duo Matmos used recordings of medical procedures; experimental pop artist Katie Gately has sampled earthquakes, car crashes, wolf howls, fighter jets and peacock screams. In 2021 an album was released by Luca Yupanqui, becoming the first ever album credited to an unborn baby after her parents used biosonic technology to pick up electromagnetic impulses from the womb and turn it into music. Last year Joe Patitucci turned weed into ambient electronica on his album 420hz: Plant Music from Cannabis Plants.
Musician, artist and composer Daniel Blumberg has also just released his album Gut. After an intestinal disease, he has made a record that includes heaves and retches, often placing the listener quite literally inside his body. “I thought it would be funny to eat the song,” he says of one track Holdback. “Halfway through the song, I try to swallow the microphone. I had the song playing in the room which I was then mic-ing, so the song was fully coming into the microphone and then I put the microphone in my mouth to swallow it. What was interesting was the reflections – to feel the song bouncing off the roof of your mouth.”
Blumberg’s album is not all puking and chomping on tunes though. Despite the deeply visceral nature of the record – which is stark, brooding and tense – it’s also one that contains a great deal of beauty, tenderness and melody, often recalling the fragility of Talk Talk or the haunting essence of late period Scott Walker.
In fact, Blumberg’s co-producer was Walker’s longtime producer Peter Walsh and Walker was a master of embracing the weird in the studio. On his 2006 album The Drift, Walker famously had his percussionist use a thick slab of meat as though it was a punchbag. He also used everything from bullwhips to machetes in the studio.
So, why do these artists favour ditching conventional recording methods for more experimental, elaborate and often extreme techniques and concepts? “With Scott, it was almost like foley,” says Walsh of the recording technique used to replicate sounds in cinema or radio. “It’s creating sounds if they don’t exist. Scott wanted to be as organic as possible. It’s easy to pull something from a sound library but the fact that it was oursound … he was very proud of that.”
During his years with Walker, Walsh dealt with all manner of requests. “He’d say: ‘I need some children screaming or a donkey’s hee-haw’,” he recalls. “It was collecting raw materials and creating sonic images. He kept the lyrics and subject matter to himself until the very end, so I didn’t ever know the context for gathering the sounds.” During the recording of Tilt, Walker hired an enormous military bass drum but when it arrived he liked the sound of the box it came in more. “I then had to get my brother-in-law to build a box that was exactly the same just so we could bang on it,” recalls Walsh.
Boxes and bones and screams and flesh are all well and good but there’s a risk of veering into needless indulgence or even novelty. “The status quo is the thing that’s killing us,” counters Herbert. “So if I’ve got a choice between a drum kit or some horse-semen shakers I’ve made then that, in a small way, is trying to challenge the status quo or trying to destabilise it. It’s trying to create something a bit silly and a bit serious. But you end up with little sonic surprises and it’s far more invigorating and exciting from a compositional point of view to be playing those kinds of noises rather than instruments that have existed for millennia.”
It also changes the look and feel of a studio environment, which in turns makes one think differently about approaches, according to Herbert. “Music making is so full of laptops, plugins, screens, black plastics and very shiny perfect surfaces,” he says. “It’s nice to turn all that off and pick up a leg of a horse and pass air through it.”
Similarly, for Katie Gately, it forms a musical relationship with the outside world. “It brings something that is deeply your own,” she says. “It’s captured originally by you, in your specific environment with your microphone. Found sounds are just more personally yours.” She can pluck beauty from seemingly anywhere. “Never underestimate the squeaky, rusted door hinges in outdoor public restrooms,” she offers.
So, what happens at the end of all this mad experimentation? When you’re tripping up over horse bones, slipping on spilled pig’s blood or stinking your studio out with rotting flesh? “I think I took it home to my mum,” recalls Walsh of Walker’s battered meat. “She might have put it in a casserole.” Herbert is touring the skeleton later this year but remains surrounded by the detritus of his experiments and is still figuring out what to do with leftover pig’s blood and a heart from over a decade ago.
Many may balk at the idea of music made from dead animals and semen but despite the extremity of the source, subtlety is usually key to achieving musical success with these strange materials. Gately deeply cherishes taking sounds that many deem annoying, strange or so insignificant as to not even register, and turning them into something unrecognisably beautiful in musical form. “From cutting an apple with a knife or opening the oven door, there’s so many wonderful sounds that could turn into characters in songs,” she says. “They all deserve the spotlight as much as Beyoncé’s vocals. They’re all potentially as powerful – and I mean that. If you can learn to carve, shape and tame a sound, it can always turn into a star.”
• The Horse by Matthew Herbert with London Contemporary Orchestra is out now on Modern Recordings. Gut by Daniel Blumberg is out now on Mute. Fawn/Brute by Katie Gately is out now on Houndstooth. The world premiere performance is at Edinburgh International festival on 18 August.
Music making is so full of laptops – it’s nice to turn all that off and pick up a leg of a horse and pass air through it
Matthew Herbert