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Across numerous projects, collaborations, and incarnations, Matt Howden has built a body of work that consistently blurs the borders between song, ritual, spoken word, and sonic experiment. Best known to many for Sieben, yet never easily contained by one format or one scene, Matt Howden has long followed a path where language, texture, and atmosphere matter as much as melody. On Language For Stone, created around the poetry of his father Keith Howden and the extraordinary sound of Skiddaw’s “musical stones,” he moves into especially evocative territory: part composition, part excavation, part landscape study. The result is an album that feels intimate and elemental at once, shaped by geology, memory, craftsmanship, and the strange life of resonance

Matt Howden interview

Q: When you recorded the singing stones for Language For Stone, did you approach them more as a field recordist documenting an acoustic phenomenon, or as a composer translating raw material into form? Where do you place yourself between preservation and transformation?

Matt: I’m definitely more the composer. But I was also keen to compose around the harmonics and foibles of the sounds I gathered, most notably the metres-long lithophone, think huge stone glockenspiel, that I sampled in Keswick Museum, and my father’s voice as he read his own poetry.

Q: The concept behind this release feels close to “music archaeology.” On a practical level, what surprised you most in the studio: pitch behavior, resonance, dynamic range, or the way stone interacts with microphones and processing?

Matt: Exactly that, the pitch behaviour of the lithophone is special, flawed, and inconsistent. How you hit each note, the harmonics, or more likely lack of them, in the resonance. The dead stones, the lively stones, the imperfect hit. The window cleaner doing his job outside, and fucking up my sampling. These were all positives to accentuate and bring out in the melodies I wrote for it. To play free with them, and with a beautifully inconsistent lithophone in the controlled and predictable environs of a studio. To roll with it, feel the nuances of its unique sound, and then pick wisely from the things you create, jam, record, tweak.

Q: You followed a route tied to Peter Crosthwaite and the Skiddaw area. While shaping the album, what ultimately became the true score: geography, story, the samples themselves, or your embodied memory of the landscape?

Matt: The plan was to pull each of these together into the project, including hidden references to the stones and the area within the artwork. We, Giulio from Archaeological Records and I, documented, photographed, took videos, and made sound recordings as we went along on a trip there. There was a lot of pawing over maps, which I love. Maps are fabulous. Some planning over which local pubs had good ales and food also took place.

Q: This is your third collaboration with your father. On Language For Stone, what felt different in your working method, your trust, or your division of roles compared to the earlier projects?

Matt: Set in stone, for each of these three projects. No “collaboration” at all. My father is a poet, and writes his poetry. I set it to music after. Of course, there are the themes we’ve set out before that get it all going, and this work was the first where there were themes for both of us to work to. Previously, I’d simply taken my father’s existing work and set it to music. Collaborations are common and usual in the DIY and underground scene I exist in. It would just seem weird with my dad, and not how either of us works in our natural states.

Q: Keith’s poetry here is intensely musical, with alliteration and hard consonants doing real rhythmic work. When language carries that much internal tempo, do you tend to let the text lead the structure, or do you build a counterstructure that reframes it?

Matt: I always work around the voice, is the simple answer. The words are king, are primary, here. I found that Elgar-style strings and slow-flowing melodies worked well under the voice. The lithophone can fill in, and even be adventurous, behind the words, due to its percussive nature and the way I shaped its sound with multiple time-based effects in the mix. It’s worth noting here just how very rhythmical my father’s reading of his poems was. After recording them, I would sit with them and a metronome click and would always find a tempo that the voice wove into perfectly. And the sonic elements within the plosives, consonants, and timbre of my dad’s voice are a pleasure to work with. Less so when he’d had whisky towards the end of the recording session.

Q: In Language For Stone the stones act as genuine percussive melody, not decorative texture. What compositional decisions helped you integrate them into violin and electronics without sanding down their geological character?

Matt: The lithophone is allowed to dominate the mix as it doesn’t interfere with the main element, the spoken word. It can dance above, set patterns opposed to the voice that don’t make the listener choose, or distract. Then there was the simple choice I allowed myself with other instruments. I stuck solidly to only bass and violins, for the most part, backing up and underpinning the voice and stones. And some nature sounds woven in, for good measure.

Q: The record sits in a rare zone between folk memory, neo-classical sensibility, and experimental sound practice. Did you imagine it primarily as a cycle of songs, or as a suite shaped by conceptual continuity more than by “song form”?

Matt: I mostly worked in a simple song form, depending on which poem it was. The spoken word forms a natural verse, stanza by stanza, and the music swells in the “chorus” in between. The melodies are often longer than pop or song melodies, more free, more thematic, but underpinned with pop, struggling for a good word there, sensibilities. Shorter phrases and drums help simplify the sound and add the ritual elements. I wanted it melodic and listenable, soaked in the landscape of the stones, and as a power bank for the words and their deep resonance.

Q: The physical edition includes a map locating the recorded stones, which is such a specific invitation. Was this meant to encourage listeners toward pilgrimage, or to underline that the landscape itself is a co-author of the work?

Matt: The landscape sprung the work. And I’d definitely encourage people to visit, the Lake District is the most beautiful set of hills in Cumbria, Northern England. Such landscape cannot help but inspire. As said, I love maps, and I love how they represent the land. Digital maps offer even more possibilities, but don’t have the pleasurable physicality of a large-scale 25,000:1 double-sided map you have to wrestle with to enjoy.

Q: There’s a striking restraint in the production. The album feels ritualistic, but it avoids pastoral nostalgia and avoids “fantasy nature” clichés. Were there particular aesthetic temptations you consciously rejected to keep the tone truthful?

Matt: Absolutely so. I tend to drift to the romantic with the violin when I drift off and play without thinking or shaping. And you wouldn’t believe the hours I spent with this, and the last Sieben album, recording strings of multiple layers, masses of edits and production tasks, only to find I’ve done the same old thing, filled the frequency spectrum too much, been predictable. The joy, and pain, of the studio is that you start again, and again, and create something special and unusual that lasts on the recording forever once it’s there. Playing that melody is never hard, finding the right part to play so often is.

Q: Looking at your wider body of work, where do you place Language For Stone now? Does it feel like a continuation of your long-standing interests in language and sound, or does it mark a quieter recalibration of what you want composition to be?

Matt: I think it harked back to some of my earlier works, “Pastoral Howden,” as someone once phrased it to me, that focused on nature, language, and landscape. As always, I tried to put the lessons learned in the previous albums to good use, and develop my sound further. I also came at this album with better production sensibilities, and the clarity that comes with making each record. And as always, this was also a reaction to my previous album, Sieben: Brand New Dark Age, where it was sonically more heavy, pounding, and electronic. I did sneak some gentle electronics into Language For Stone too, though. My father’s poems, his words, make this album what it is. A real pleasure to work with them, and make this album with him and my good friend Giulio. My mother even wrote the sleeve liner note on Peter Crosthwaite, the original finder of the “musical stones of Skiddaw.”

Funnily enough, I’ve started the next Sieben album, which may end up being called In The Strange, far heavier music than Language For Stone, but I’ve carried over my use of the lithophone into this album. It has a cold-wave keys feel to it when mixed with beats and my heavier violin style.

Karo Kratochwil

Based in Wrocław, I work as a music journalist and photographer covering electro, industrial, EBM, gothic, and darkwave. My work includes features and live coverage, as well as concert, portrait, promo, and theater photography. What interests me most is the connection between artistic intention, what the work communicates, and what unfolds live on stage, all in pursuit of the bigger picture behind the music.

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