The End of Silence

An album from the sound of a bomb

I was part of the band that made the Matthew Herbert album The End of Silence in 2013. The entire album is created out of a single sound: a recording of a bomb being dropped in Libya.

The team making the album included Matthew Herbert, Tom Skinner, Sam Beste, Hugh Jones, and Dilip Harris.

I built a bunch of custom software and adapted my One Pig gametrak setup to do some new things, splitting the strings out across the whole band.

Matthew, Tom, Sam, and I approached the recording almost like a jazz quartet – we each had separate instruments that we used to delve into the sound and we recorded the whole album live, playing as a group. There were no overdubs, Matthew gave us a rough structure and some of the musical ideas that he wanted to explore in each movement, and we used that as the basis for a series of improvisations. It was an extremely powerful experience.

You can read a review of the album on Pitchfork.