Horse bones musician

Matthew Herbert on making music from an equine skeleton - tapping into the history of both music and the horse, bringing the horse back to life through sound – and the day a bronze horse turned up on his land

- Eleanor Jones

I grew up listening to and playing music, drawing and reading.

At university, I did drama but while I was there, I discovered electronic music. I was lucky and this has been a serious endeavour. The Horse album is somewhere between science, archaeology, art, music and understanding horses, plus the divide between rural and urban areas, and climate change. The artistic and creative process allows us to explore some of these things and hopefully engage in unusual ways and find a different model for the future, as the current one isn’t really working.

I started this album by accident.

I’d been in talks with a record label about a piece for orchestra, and didn’t want to do the music you might expect. I wanted to do something with a skeleton as there’s something very musical about them. The repetition of the ribs, the resonant chambers of the skull – and disassembled, it almost looks like musical notation.

I was looking on eBay for the biggest skeleton I could find – I knew I wanted to make a record out of one – and a horse came up, with only a day left, so I bought it quickly.