Matthew Herbert, a British dj and producer of modern house who is also known as
Radio Boy, Wishmountain, Doctor Rockit, shares with
Matmos the honor of having pioneered the use
of "organic" samples (noises, not instruments) to compose dance music.
The building blocks for his music are often random people's noises.
Percussion sounds are manufactured out of sources as a heart or an unborn
child (Herbert abhors drum machines).
The sounds of everyday life is not only the source but also the meaning
of his art.
A student of drama at Exeter University, Herbert started sampling found sounds
as a way to create realistic soundtracks for his plays. Soon, he would entertain
with live shows in which the sounds were created out of everyday objects and
the environment. Eventually, he started applying the same technique to the
dance floor.
He relocated to London in 1994 and in january of 1996 released the three
EPs that marked the directions of his career:
Wishmountain's Radio (ambient and techno), Doctor Rockit's
Ready To Rockit (jazzy electro) and Herbert's Part One (house).
In a little over four years, Herbert would release 25 singles and 4 albums,
and become a fashionable disc jockey and producer.
Doctor Rockit released the EPs D For Doctor (Clear) and
Recorded In Swingtime (Clear), the singles
Pockit Doctor (Clear) and Pager (Multiplex), and
the albums
The Music of Sound (Clear, 1996),
Indoor Fireworks (Lifelike, 2000), with
Cafe' de Flore, and the compilation
The Unnecessary History (Accidental, 2004), all devoted to domestic
vignettes.
On The Music of Sound (Clear), tracks such as
Cafe Beograd and Hong Kong
evoke the experiences which created them;
the rattling glasses, accordion fragments, and
vocal snippets reconstruct these places in musical
form. Simpler compositions like
Granny Delicious
and
Runner in Hastings Park create engaging
rhythms and melodies from the ubiquitous sounds
of everyday life. On
Song Without Words, the
bare and lonely arrangement of Fender Rhodes and
saxophone sketch out a scene which resolves itself
later in
Song Without Italian Words, where the
same music is played in a cafe in Italy, complete
with conversational snippets, clattering dishes, and
church bells ringing in the distance.
Wishmountain has released the EPs Video (Universal Language)
and Bottle (Antiphon) and the album
Wishmountain Is Dead (Antiphon, 1998), his most experimental work,
which utilizes found noises to create dance music.
Radio Boy has released
Long Live Radio Boy (Antiphon, 1997), another abstract soundpainting,
Lift Attendants Holiday (Antiphon),
London (Antiphon),
Sight Of Sound (Antiphon).
Herbert released the EPs Part 2,
Part 3, Part 4,
Part 5 and the albums
Parts 1-3 (Phono) and the all-instrumental album
100lbs (Phono, 1996 - K7, 2006), that collected his house music.
More EPs followed:
Birds (Back To Basics),
Got To Be Movin' (Classic),
Going Round (Phonography),
Never Give Up (Phonography),
So Now (Phonography),
Live Dubs (Phonography),
Back To The Start (Plug Research),
We All Need Love (Phonography).
The album Around The House (Phonography, 1998), that used the sounds
of household objects, featured the first songs.
In 2000 Herbert published an artistic manifesto in which he proclaimed his loathe of sampling (of other people's music) and of drum machines.
Herbert had been studying jazz on the piano and took on songwriting,
and the result was the intimate Bodily Functions (K7, 2001).
Its electronic jazzy songs are constructed around the manipulated sounds of
an unborn child (the nocturnal piano-based lounge-soul ballad You're Unknown To Me),
of percolating blood (the fractured, robotic Foreign Bodies),
of a heart (the chamber-jazz elegy On Reflection),
of bottles (the fragile Addiction),
of a surgical laser (the gospel-ish You Saw It All), etc.
Sensual singer Dani Siciliano helps make
the seven-minute It's Only (IDM polyrhythms, Brazilian phrasing, sparse instrumental sounds)
and
Suddenly (metronomic techno beat, jazzy piano solo, ethic percussion jam)
more than
mere sonic puzzles.
I Miss You outdoes Everything But The Girl.
Herbert's love for vintage jazz music (impeccably imitated in the instrumental
I Know, in the smoky ballad The Last Beat, in
the piano fantasia About This Time Each Day)
and for house music (the thick basslines of It's Only and Leave Me Now,
the ethereal Leave Me Now,
the splendid rhythmic progression of album stand-out The Audience with vocal harmonies
of the 1930s)
are the frosting on the cake.
This is his most sophisticated effort yet, a futuristic variation on
Arto Lindsay's revisionist techniques.
As far as "atmospheric" pop music goes, Herbert has few rivals.
In a sense, Herbert is the terminal point of the zeitgeist that had begot
trip-hop and jazztronica.
Not surprisingly, Herbert described the album as a cycle of odes to alienation.
Secondhand Sounds (Peacefrog, 2002) is a mix/remix album.
On Goodbye Swingtime (Accidental, 2003)
Herbert leads a Matthew Herbert Big Band (four trumpets, four trombones, five saxes, piano, bass, drums) through a program of old and new compositions, helped by conductor/composer/arranger Peter Wraight. The music was manipulated electronically by
Herbert after the fact. The result is relatively conventional, closer to Harry Mancini than Gil Evans or Russell, and including several romantic ballads.
Plat du Jour (Accidental, 2005), his most political statement yet, is
a mostly instrumental work that samples his various styles without succeeding
at any.
Ruby Blue (Echo, 2005), credited only to Roisin Murphy,
but de facto a collaboration between Herbert and Moloko singer Roisin Murphy,
was Matthew Herbert's first venture into dance-floor music.
The songs of Scale (2006), his first accomplished album in five years,
were built from samples of more than 600 objects
(Just Once alone uses 177 sampled sounds), but, as stated in his 2000
manifesto, he refrained from simply sampling instruments.
Each melody and rhythm is meticulously constructed in the studio.
Even the ubiquitous "strings" are not strings at all.
And, still, the result is a body of the most robust and cohesive dance songs
of his career, each propelled with bouncing beats and peppered with catchy melodies.
It is "lite" electronica, but nonetheless the orchestrations of
The Movers and the Shakers (that harkens back to the age of funky-soul),
Something Isn't Right (almost a tribute to Diana Ross and early disco-music) and
Moving Like A Train (whose vocal harmonies almost match The Audience's)
compare favorably with the post-modernist disco inventions of
Peter Gordon.
The deconstructions that remain at an abstract level, such as
Harmonise (vocal side of the equation) and We're in Love (orchestral side of the equation) and Just Once (soundsculpting side of the equation), are no less intriguing than the fully realized songs.
The agit-prop tirades are a nuisance, but they do not interfere too much with
Herbert's madcap collage.
Herbert finally returned to his specialty, and crafted an electronic tour
de force, although five songs too long.
Score (2007) collects Herbert's scores for movie soundtracks.
There's Me and There's You (2008),
the second album credited to the Matthew Herbert Big Band,
disturbed even more elegant and catchy big-band jazz with electronic noises, and, again, referenced contemporary political events. The big band was
now fronted by Zimbabwe-born vocalist Eska Mtungwazi.
Matthew Herbert changed course dramatically on One One (2010), a
traditionally singer-songwriter album that includes the gentle
single Leipzig.
One Club (2010) created electronic dance music from samples of a
night-club.
Best of the "One" series, was
One Pig (2011), basically a concept about a
pig's life from its birth to becoming a dish on someone's table,
every "song" created from samples of the pig's life (or death).
Hence we are treated to the sound of
the pig's severed head rolling on a table, and to the sounds of
the preparation of the meat.
The only exception is the last piece, after the pig has been eaten,
that is a simple elegy for voice and guitar: there is no pig anymore.