Dark Veganism: The Instrumental Intimacies of Matthew Herbert’s One Pig

Abstract

I put on my headphones and press play. While listening to the first track, “August 2009,” on British electronic musician Matthew Herbert’s album One Pig (2011), I hear the rustling of the wind being picked up by a Sennheiser 418 m/s mic and a Nagra V recorder.¹ Within seconds, I notice the murmur of poultry. The clucking quickly fades to the background. Then, eerily, there is nothing but dead air for forty seconds. After this lull, there is a jarring exhalation of breath that is treated with both delay and reverb. For the next two and half minutes, the track features the uneasy sounds of a sow undergoing labour. As birds chirp in the background, the sow’s breathing increases in tempo and moves toward a climax that comprises snorts. Then, the outburst trails off and leads to an almost imperceptible sound, which is shortly explained by Herbert himself on the recording: “That was it; it was being born.” The remainder of “August 2009” consists of snorting and squealing sounds accompanied by pitches generated from a sample of Herbert’s video camera shutting off. Commenting on this track, Herbert explains how “it becomes like a dialogue between me and my video recording and the pig itself.”² As One Pig opens with a recording of a recording, it asks us not only to listen to the pig’s “temporal afterlife”³ but also to consider the documentation, production, consumption, and ethics of animal media.