Music for the pigs

Last August, music producer Matthew Herbert (above) invited 40 people to a restaurant in Farringdon, London, to eat a pig -- on condition that he could record them doing so. Ten chefs, including Ramsay alumnus Jason Atherton and offal-specialist Fergus Henderson, cooked ten courses, from spiced braised pig's head to fried tail. Guests took their food to a corner of the room where a sound technician asked them to "chew as loudly as possible, please" into two microphones. "I wanted to acknowledge every bite of it," says Herbert.

For two years before the meal, Herbert had visited the pig every fortnight, from its birth to butchery, using a Sennheiser 418-S mic and Nagra recorder to document the animal's eating noises. The result is One Pig, an album made up of sampled sounds from the pig's life and death. A cow's lowing in the stable next door ended up on the track "October"; drum sounds were fashioned on an instrument made from the pig's skin and played with its bones.

Tom Cheshire, Wired. A musical pig-out.