I think people are complacent about sound, because we're so limited by the textures and timbres we hear in music, but in our everyday life we hear the most incredible things.
HerbertI know I have patterns and I've always tried hard to avoid them. There are definitely certain things in my music, if I'm looking back, "Well, that was a period where I was experimenting with a certain kind of chord structure or a certain kind of sound." I've tried really hard, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you what that sound, what that tangible sound of "me" is.
HerbertCivilization rests on a set of promises; if the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.
HerbertI don't listen to a huge amount of music generally. Partly because you've sat in a studio for 10 hours and then when you come home you just want to read a book, and listen to the sound of your central heating system.
HerbertActually, time and time again people always come back to my early, more innocent stuff, and say, "I kind of prefer that." I could go back to writing that and probably make more people happy, but it just doesn't feel like the right thing to do. I don't want to take the lazy route.
HerbertI think this market space, this modern world we're living in, one of its greatest failures is that it can only seem to describe a collective in terms of consumers or clients. It never sees an audience or a community as part of the process. And that's something I'm quite proud of, even if the music is crap.
Herbert