The producer and conceptual artist is orchestrating a strange focus group to sample sounds for his latest musical project, One Club. The album is an attempt at democratising electronic music, to give his most avid fans the chance to participate in the creation of each bleep and beat. We have been warned that microphones are all around us – on the ceiling, in the toilets and on the lapels of a fellow clubber.

The audience is asked to kiss the person next to them, to jangle their keys, to stamp their feet, to dance, to laugh: to club. We are told to rattle the change in our pockets once for each EUR10,000 in our pay packet, to whistle in different ways to denote our sexual orientation, to shout out the name of the political party we voted for. The album was played for the first time at the Robert Johnson on 8 July. Herbert will also perform in Britain at the Big Chill and Green Man festivals in August.

‘One Club is designed to be both a functioning body of dance music in its own right, but at the same time a celebration of the temporary communities that come together weekly around the world in clubs. Since the record is made entirely from sounds recorded in one night at a German night club, the audience is implicated directly in the outcome of the music and hopefully stronger links are made between the DJ, the music itself and the act of dancing,’ Herbert says.

‘For a long time now, clubs have accepted a corporate version of reality, with excessive branding and sponsorship, yet reluctant to acknowledge the potential political or social power implicit in large numbers of young people gathering in public places. The One Club project is intended to offer an alternative version of that relationship between the audience, the building, the locality, the political, the performer and the music.’

Speaking after the two hour recording, Herbert tells me: ‘I was surprised how much pleasure they got from being told what to do. It transformed the space. It was really hard work keeping the momentum going and getting the sounds in a clear enough state to use them. Also, I wanted to record what is really there, not to manipulate what’s there. It’s not a laboratory, it’s a night club. With a music studio, significant amounts of money are spent on shutting the real world out. Soundproofing suggests we’re frightened of the outside world where it is inconsistent – but you would record atmosphere.’

Herbert first performed live as Wishmountain in 1995, using only a pepper pot as an instrument. Since then his music has always been conceptually driven – he has driven a tank over a cooking dish and shot it to get a sample. His dance record Bodily Functions was a global success.

His label, Accidental, has also been lauded for its individuality. The Invisible, 2009 Mercury Prize nominees, chose it to release their eponymous album. Paul Morley, writing in the Guardian, has described Herbert as a ‘restless militant outsider musical progressive in a culture increasingly cuddling up to conformity’.

One Club is a ten-track dance record that marks a return to Herbert’s most well known and commercial sound. But it is so much more. The second of a trilogy of ‘One’ projects, it continues with a departure from his previous grand, extravagant and awe-inspiring Matthew Herbert Big Band project because each record is constructed around a single concept: One One, his most intensely personal record to date; One Club; and One Pig, in which he documents an animal’s life and death.

Each contains the DNA of the Herbert manifesto: high concept and hand crafted, catchy and compelling. To understand this trilogy – as with all of Matthew’s work – we are invited to examine the handiwork. Like an antique chest of drawers, to know if it is genuine you have to remove the drawers, turn them over, look at the quality of the joins, the hinges, the varnish.

Deaf ears

I met Herbert for the first time in a antiquated hotel in central London. He wanted to talk about an audacious international political stunt he had performed but that had gone unnoticed by his intended audience. Herbert had been invited to contribute to the ‘idents’ for the Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow in 2009. When he came to producing the musical introduction for Israel, he decided to include samples of gunfire aimed at innocent Palestinians, grinding tanks and the seemingly euphoric sound of water drops. His intelligent, high risk, moral statement fell almost entirely on deaf ears.

And so Herbert is consciously a political performer. The website for Accidental counts the number of estimated dead in Iraq. His ‘One Life’ from the album There Is Me and There is You produces one beat for every 1,000 killed following the invasion, while ‘Battery’ is an ode to British resident Bisher Amin Khalil-al Rawi, tortured in Iraq after being arrested with a battery charger.

The musician avoids tendentious agitprop, however, and argues that being a member of a party or group is ‘the antithesis’ of the Herbert manifesto. He is also conscious of the limitations of his own ability to preach to a club audience: ‘I do sometimes think I am battling against a lot of ingrained ideas about what music is and what it can do. People out on a Saturday night do not necessarily want to be challenged about the world.’

‘There is definitely a sense in the dance music world that I am a party pooper because I don’t just want to have a good time and take drugs, or whatever,’ Herbert continues. ‘There is a valuable place for that kind of sense of transcending the mundane contained in electronic – but it should not only be that.

‘People do not think of music being political unless it is left wing. But 50 Cent is talking about using violence against your enemy, oppressing women and making money – they are the same messages as the government. Within the new music there are no overtly political songs – it is all there but it’s much less obvious. For me it is as honest as I can be.’

To understand the political message of Herbert, you need to look beyond bold public statements and lyrics. You need to know that the beats that represent the dead in Iraq are sampled from the bleep of the life support machine of his first child, born prematurely and lucky to be alive. As he says: ‘It is very easy to say the war is shit, or to catalogue the number of people who died. But what is harder is to represent the personal, which is why the beats in that song are from when my son was in intensive care.’ The message of Herbert’s manifesto lies in the mode of production.

Toilet mics

When I arrive at Herbert’s home studio, down an idyllic

side street in the newly fashionable Kent seaside town of Whitstable, I immediately stumble over a microphone angled into the basin of the toilet and another into the sink. The mics are recording the sound of water swilling down the plughole to add the finishing touches to Rowdy Superstar’s first album.

This is vintage Matthew Herbert. There is a manic, almost compulsive drive to record the world around him. This is explained in part by the fact that his father worked as a BBC sound engineer. However, the enigma of Herbert is to be unlocked further back in his family tree.

One Club is a fascination with the production process, as is everything Herbert has created to date. Not just in terms of sound engineering, but in the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the smells and tastes, sights and sounds that aggregate into human experience. This informs Herbert’s interest in ethical consumerism, his opposition to war, his meticulous research for One Pig.

Of his early childhood, he says: ‘I grew up without a TV; we never had one in the family home. My days were filled with playing different instruments, making stuff, drawing. I started piano from the age of four – and played all the way to university.’

Later in the conversation, he adds: ‘Nobody crafts anything any more. We do not have a table made by a person; we do not know how to recognise a good table or a bad table. My great-grandfather was a master coach-builder and I brought him a table I made at school and the first thing he did was turn it upside down and say it was crap – but he was right. I had not even varnished the bottom.’

The Herbert experience of the world is alienation and Herbert’s music is his resistance. Like Sartre, he is conscious in every moment he lives of the way people no longer love or own what they produce. They no longer ‘make things’. The commodities that are produced appear alien and hostile. The companies that produce are inhuman and destructive. Herbert’s is not a reactionary, agrarian romanticisation of handicraft. He clearly has no moral difficulty with embracing the new. Instead, the music has the ring of authenticity, of human creativity: it is a call to arms for quality.

Capitalist mass production, capitalist alienation, has destroyed the craft of music, he suggests: ‘All musicians are using the same samples and techniques – it’s a bit like a giant Lego club where everyone’s given the same blocks and same wheels and everyone is told to build different cars out of the back of it.

‘You are distanced from risk, from the humanity of it, by which I mean life is a pain in the arse.

‘People today are interested in the product, not the process. We do not see where our food comes from. I recorded at a landfill site and it is one of the most depressing things. Around 90 metres by 90 metres of landfill and they dig it 30 metres down. They fill it hundreds of metres above ground level – and that’s just one year’s rubbish from Canterbury. In Whitstable, Hatchards was 150 years old and they replaced it with Costa. Capitalism is the replacement of the historical with the ahistorical, with the asocial. And we have no idea where the coffee comes from.’

So with One Pig Herbert will archive through sound the process of a pig being born, slaughtered, butchered and scattered through the capitalist mode of production: drum skin, bone flutes and toothbrush bristles will produce the sounds for the recording. Informed by Christien Meindertsma’s book PIG 05049, Herbert expects to follow the pig’s body into paint, heat valves and 185 other products – including bullets. The allegory, as with George Orwell’s Animal Farm, is resonant.

We are at the UK press screening of his new film The Yes Men Fix the World, and when I emerge from the impressively plush toilets at the Hospital private members’ club in London’s Covent Garden a few moments later Mike is there handing out bottles of B’Eau Pal mineral water. We exchange a few pleasantries and before long he is trying to recruit me to a protest at the Dow headquarters in London giving out more of the aesthetically pleasing bottled water.

B’Eau Pal is not the latest expensive table water found at the Ivy. Instead it is a prop designed to remind the staff at Dow and the wider world about the continued contamination caused by the explosion at the Bhopal chemical works in India, which left more than 15,000 dead and half a million poisoned.

Eye-catching hoaxes

Mike and Andy Bichlbaum are not stars in the traditional sense. They are political activists, and their speciality is performing eye-catching hoaxes to name and shame corporations in the world media. In short, Mike and Andy are walking public relations disasters. Their targets so far have included Dow Chemical, Halliburton and the post-hurricane privateers of New Orleans.

The Yes Men’s biggest achievement to date has been hoaxing the BBC into broadcasting worldwide an interview in which Andy claimed to be from Dow Chemical. He offered to compensate the victims of Bhopal – and the ‘news’ wiped $2 billion from the market value of Dow.

Their second film is a human, behind the scenes documentary of the stunt and a whistle-stop world tour of conferences duped by the ‘culture jamming’ antics of the Yes Men. During the feature Mike and Andy begin to understand, to their frustration, that individual chief executive officers do not control the future of their companies. Instead the ‘free market’ delivers extreme and sudden punishments to any firms that try to adopt genuine corporate responsibility over environmental and human rights issues – as we see with the Dow hoax.

The film is co-directed by Kurt Engfehr, who has worked with Michael Moore, and it has much of the informed polemics found in Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 9/11. The difference from Moore is that this stuff is knockabout funny; what we are witnessing here is the rise of comedic journalism.

The trials and tribulations of the likeable, affable and fallible Yes Men provide the narrative thread that holds the story together as we watch their chaotic journey from one high-jinx situation to the next. But the plot tends to meander and viewers not committed to the cause could be lost along the route. The film also lacks some of the visual power and humour of the stunts themselves.

Changing the world?

The important question, however, is whether the Yes Men have really changed the world? And was this their ambition?

‘If the environmental movement did not exist then the world would be much more fucked than it is and there would be no hope of reducing our carbon emissions and all that,’ says Andy.

I interviewed the Yes Men at the roof restaurant of Soho House in London. Both men look like fish out of water in such luxurious surroundings, despite the fact they have made going undercover at lavish corporate events a life’s work. They would clearly be happier at a protest or activist meeting.

Andy continues: ‘The decision to go on BBC World and pose as a spokesperson for Dow came out of a discussion with Greenpeace and was successful in linking the name of Dow to an incident they did not want to acknowledge. The decision to go to New Orleans came from a suggestion from an activist and friend who is working down there with people locally. Everything we have done has been through working with activist groups which are following these issues in a longer-term way.

‘We have this position and way of working with the media and getting stories into the international press and finding creative ways of doing that. We do what we know how to do to contribute to the bigger movement.’

So how do the Yes Men feel when they are surrounded by Halliburton executives? Are they really trying to persuade them to introduce ethical products or is it only a stunt for the mass media?

Andy replies: ‘When we hoaxed the SurvivaBalls [spoof climate change survival suit] from Halliburton we were trying to say this was a very individualist approach in which the richest people would be protected from the climate change catastrophe which their carbon intensive companies had caused. Yet we had people coming up to us afterwards and congratulating us on the product. So, this is about getting the message in the press. This is about getting people to become involved in the movement and acting on the issues we have tried to raise.’

A chance to reconsider

The film comes out during a global recession. There is extensive explanation of market forces and neoliberalism. But will people still care about corporate responsibility at a time of financial crisis?

Andy thinks for a moment, and then says: ‘We really hope that the recession will make it more likely that people will see and understand what is happening. It is because of irresponsible lending and inadequate laws and financial rules that allow them to do these crazy things and run these pyramid schemes.

‘We would like to see government bringing in new laws that prevent this from happening again. There is much to fight for because this is a chance to reconsider and do things differently. Companies can’t really claim now that they are acting in our interests. The public must be mobilised to make this change happen. It is not going to happen because the corporations won’t act unless we force them.’

He adds: ‘The argument over the last 30 years was that the more profit people made the better it was for everyone, for ordinary people. The financial crisis is now going to cost these people their homes. We were told that there was “trickle down” and we got Milton Friedman on the television saying we were “free to choose” – that was the dogma. When I was growing up at school we didn’t get religious lessons but we did get Milton Friedman.’

The Yes Men give a resounding ‘no’ to the policies of the pioneer neoliberal economist Friedman in the film. But, I ask, are there any other dead, male, grey haired economists they do like? Keynes? Marx?

Andy says instantly: ‘Keynes, probably. There are some very simple things we can do now, things which are common sense – not allowing corporations to carry on at the expense of everything else. For example, we could just eliminate corporate lobbying from Washington and introduce a tax based on how much damage is done to the environment.’

I have time for one more question. Do you think Obama will make a significant difference? Mike, who has been taking a phone call, steps in: ‘This is a very difficult area, but there is a lot of hope. There has to be a lot of action and campaigning on the ground – much more than there has been for the last eight years.

‘In the United States under George Bush we could have shouted however loudly we wanted and the government would have carried on and done what it wanted. Now, the more pressure we assert on Obama the more likely he is to enact the laws that we need to protect the environment.’

However, he adds: ‘This is a really desperate time. The way I see it, this is make or break time. This is it. This is the moment when we decide whether or not we have a future. But everybody keeps carrying on. We need to make laws that define what is possible for this world. The market is always going to do whatever makes the most profit. The market left alone will not make what we need it to make.’

The Yes Men have presented themselves as comic superheroes dressed in gold lamé at corporate events and their daring attempts to fix the world are genuinely inspiring. I remember Mike’s invitation to protest at Dow and try to disguise my desire to join these maverick crusaders. As we say goodbye Andy grips my hand, looks me directly in the eye and says sternly and conspiratorially: ‘We’re looking for new Yes Men, you know.’

Read the full interview at Brendan Montague’s newsblog