Matthew Herbert has evolved to a point where he is essentially a hyper-smart 21st-century melding of Brian Eno, Aphex Twin and the Dogme school of filmmaking. Having a decade ago penned a manifesto, the Personal Contract for the Composition of Music (Incorporating the Manifest of Mistakes), which applied rigid fundamentalist constraints to his creative process, his theoretical bent is again hugely in evidence in the trilogy of albums he is releasing this year.

The opener, One One, saw Herbert both sing and play every single instrument on a surprisingly organic and low-key suite of music, but One Club is something else entirely. It's a conceptual piece, formed entirely of sounds that Herbert recorded in one night by hanging microphones above the dance floor, in the DJ booth and even in the bar and cloakroom of the Robert Johnson nightclub in Frankfurt. The resulting sounds are tweaked, distorted and manipulated within an inch of their lives by Herbert in producer-alchemist mode: Elements of the work recall the minimal techno and industrial house he crafted under his earlier Radio Boy and Doctor Rockit personae, but this austere musique concrete is regularly interrupted here by such slapstick elements as flushing toilets and the massed… read more »