Found sounds with Matthew Herbert, Matmos, Nwando Ebizie and Kate Carr

Matthew Herbert, Kate Carr, Nwando Ebizie and Matmos's Martin Schmidt discuss making music from 'found sound' and field recordings, and the ethical, social and political implications that arise when you push music to its extreme. What happens when you record the sounds of a surgeon performing plastic surgery and turn it into an album? How can the sounds of a traffic intersection become music? Are there some sounds that you simply can't make music from?

Matthew Herbert is an artist based in the seaside town of Margate, south-east England, who is a close collaborator of Bjork and has remixed everyone from Quincy Jones and Serge Gainsbourg to Gustav Mahler. He is renowned for taking ordinary sounds and turning them into music; his 2011 record ONE PIG followed the life of a pig from birth to plate, and his 2019 album The State Between Us explored what it means to be British, featuring samples of everything from swimming in the English Channel, to a trumpet being deep-fried.

He is joined by Martin Schmidt, one half of the ground-breaking Baltimore-based duo Matmos, who have made electronic music out of everything from the sounds of brushing hair to throwing aspirin tablets at a drumkit. Matmos have worked with the likes of Yo La Tengo, Oneohtrix Point Never and Bjork, and their latest album, The Consuming Flame, came out in 2020.

Kate Carr is a field recordist and sound artist from Australia, based in London. She has recorded sounds everywhere from fishing villages in northern Iceland to the wetlands of Mexico, and runs her own sound art label, Flaming Pines.

Nwando Ebizie is a multi-disciplinary artist based in northern England, whose practice brings together music, performance art, and dance from the African diaspora. Her latest project, The Swan, will be released in 2022 and is an exploration in Afrofuturism, featuring layers of "dance-inducing polyrhythms, call-and-response chants and Afro-Cuban drums".