The End of Silence is the new album from British electronic composer Matthew Herbert, set for release on June 24th via his own Accidental Records.
The upcoming effort was composed “entirely from a 10-second sound recording” of an aircraft bombing captured by war photographer Sebastian Meyer in Libya in 2011.

“I wanted to freeze history, press pause, wander around inside the sound—trying to understand its component parts, wondering why it was so scary when I had never actually heard any bomb first hand,” Herbert explains. “In stark contrast to the written reports of the atrocities committed by dictators in the Arab word during the Arab Spring, here was something that rendered it real. It turned the virtual word back in to the visceral. Despite immediate and disparate access to news of world events, it’s rare to find something that punctures the safe veneer of distance that computers create. By hearing this sound, one is compelled to live inside the moment.”

Herbert “fragmented and atomised” the recording into samples, and it was then improvised by his band comprising musicians Tom Skinner, Yann Seznec and Sam Beste.
Recorded last summer in a barn in Wales over three days, The End of Silence is split into three parts. You can get a taster off it now with an excerpt from the original 24-minute ‘Part One’.