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Music

Herbert Shatters Expectations Once Again with New Album Track "Battle"

The visionary producer is back at it with a cranium-rattling new video.

While most of us spend the better half of a year trying to locate misplaced socks, the experimentally minded producer Matthew Herbert took the reins at the recently revamped and relaunched BBC Radiophonic Orchestra as Creative Director, directed a play, The Hush, at the National Theatre, put on his debut opera at the Royal Opera House, scored a film for the BFI and recorded an album in seven days live on stage with an audience at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin.

In addition to all that impressive activity, Herbert's somehow found the time to record a full-length follow up to 2006's deeply dark Scale - The Shakes. Given that pervious Herbert albums have seen him exploring the life cycle of a pig (One Pig), manipulating human hair and skin as well as internal bodily organs into a dancefloor friendly soundtrack (Bodily Functions), and reworking the sound of apple-eating into crunchy dance music (Plat Du Jour) it's unsurprising that The Shakes isn't your standard house or techno artist album.

This time around he's incorporating familial relics, protest songs, bullet-shell ricochets and the voluminous vastness of a church organ into the mix. The Shakes is released on June 1 on Caroline International, but Herbert's embracing the age of the stream by dripfeeding us with tracks from the record on a near weekly basis up to launch. See above for an exclusive first listen to "Battle," a rich, atmospheric, cut from one of the records of the year. Oh, and the video has Herbert doing a really good impression of Rob Brydon in Marion and Geoff.

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