Matthew Herbert just took the meticulously reductionist values of his One trilogy and further narrowed his focus. This time around, he zeroes in on a brief moment in time in order to explore his feelings about a single act of terror. The End of Silence uses one 5-second sample as its sole building block, which is contorted and manipulated by Herbert and a three-piece band he put together for this recording. That sample is a recording of a pro-Gaddafi plane flying over Libya and dropping its deadly payload, prefigured by a whistle and a cry that hastily warn of the event. In a 2011 interview Herbert talked of how we now have "the capacity to listen to the world in a different way." This is his way of slowing the world down to make sense of it, in the process creating something that shares the weight of a blood-spattered historical snapshot that provokes an uncomfortably lingering gaze.
There are just three tracks here, the first of which is almost 25-minutes long, while the shortest is just over 10 minutes. Herbert's stated intent is to "freeze history, press pause, wander around inside the sound." The music works in direct inverse to the event itself, providing acres of time to stop and think and ponder the consequences. Herbert exploits the silence as much as the act itself, stretching out the sense of anxiety that leads up to the terrifying point of impact. The first part is often mixed so sounds are barely perceptible, forcing you to crank the volume. It's a trick that serves to emphasize the bomb drop when it comes, ripping and tearing through the sound, sometimes bolstered by a thick layer of distortion. The use of silence is transportative, triggering an evaluation of the actions of the people on the ground, posing impossible questions about the thoughts rushing through their heads.
What's striking about this work is how it's set up as the antithesis of 24-hour rolling news culture, where bombs sailing out of the sky are presented with a rote facade, then passed over for the next space-filler on the agenda. It's almost old-fashioned in a way, bringing a layer of meaning back to a singular event, pointing out how we're glazing over atrocities that may have caught the world's attention had they taken place in less media-saturated times. The processing through which Herbert and his band force the sample often make it unrecognizable, but they're careful to imbue their tinkering with feelings of fear, dread, and suffering. It's not exactly music as reportage, but when the pace picks up in the second part it often has the same sense of urgency as someone frantically typing up a report, sending an important dispatch outlining how a small part of the world just changed forever.
Distance plays an important part here, too, with Herbert working in sounds of the natural world, all captured on mics set up outside the barn in Wales where these tracks were recorded. It's a valuable reminder of how far outside the original sound he is, of how alien the whole process of exploring a bomb drop is to the average person. This is an approximation of terror, an artificial rendering of distress constructed in a relatively safe space, where shrapnel becomes a percussion instrument and human cries become neatly layered loops. It adds an air of surreality to the album, at times drawing on that sense of being anesthetized to events like this, where you feel so far removed that it's tough to find meaning amid the blizzard of information. The End of Silence is Herbert effectively tussling with what "significance" means at this particular moment in time, in a record that's as much a part of the gathering noise of the 21st century as it is a comment on the constant numbing we've wreaked upon ourselves.
