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Artist News Gigs & Festivals Releases
Matthew Herbert releases track from Brexit album, announces week-long single
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 22 March 2019
Next week, if we’re really super lucky, we face the prospect of tumbling out of the European Union with no deal in place, given that – even though a small extension of the UK’s EU membership is now on offer – Westminster is in such disarray, who knows what will happen?
But at least we’ll have something to listen to as all that drama plays out, as next week also sees the release of Matthew Herbert’s two years in production Brexit-themed album, ‘The State Between Us’.
The project officially began at the moment the UK government stupidly and prematurely triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and began the whole farce we’ve been living through ever since. Since that day, Herbert has been making good use of his freedom of movement, travelling around the EU to collaborate with as many people as possible before we’re officially due to leave the union on 29 Mar.
The album will be released by Herbert’s Matthew Herbert Big Band, renamed the Matthew Herbert Great Britain And Gibraltar European Union Membership Referendum Big Band for this project. Ahead of the LP’s launch, new track ‘Where’s Home?’ has just been made available. Listen here:
This isn’t the only piece of new music Herbert is releasing before Brexit day, though. Today he’s putting out the longest single ever recorded, ‘A Week In The Life Of A Tree’. Running at 166 hours, the track – as the title suggests – records the last seven days in the life of a 180 year old tree in a Hamburg forest.
A portion of this recording is used on the opening track on ‘The State Between Us’, which is called ‘A Devotion On Emergent Occasions’. However, the full version serves more of a distracting purpose – being released this week will give you something else to focus on, rather than whatever Brexit nonsense fills the next seven days.
“I’d rather listen to a tree than Boris Johnson”, says Herbert. “Brexit is an expensive, and pointless exercise compared to the existential emergency of climate change. If the next generation is to survive in to the next century, we need to urgently change the economic system we’ve built and that means paying more attention to the other forms of life we share the planet with than the Daily Express”.
The recording is available for you to listen to at your leisure from today. Although if you like things to be perfectly timed, NTS Radio will be broadcasting it from early on Saturday morning, timing the sound of the tree being felled at exactly 11pm on 29 Mar – the point at which the UK is officially set to leave the European Union (even if 12 Apr is now looking more likely as the earliest possible date).
As well as all this, The Matthew Herbert Great Britain And Gibraltar European Union Membership Referendum Big Band will be performing live twice at the Royal Court Theatre in London 29 Mar.
Watch a trailer briefly explaining the process behind the creation of ‘The State Between Us’ here:
Also – and this isn’t really related to any of this – but I just read Herbert’s book, ‘The Music’, and it’s very good.
