WED., MAY 02, 2007
Post Spotlight to FacebookIn This Feature
Magazine Archives:
Happy Accidents: Matthew Herbert
by Philip Sherburne
Matthew Herbert's has always been a meatier sound than almost everyone else's — and by meatier, I mean that you don't just taste the pizza but everything around it: the wax paper, the cardboard box, the little plastic spacer that keeps the lid from sticking to the pie. In an era when electronic music has often aspired to create surfaces as pristine and grit-free as possible — the techno equivalent of Baroque harpsichord music — Herbert has emphasized the dirt in everything, every soundwave muddied with earwax and accident.
Accidents are one of Herbert's main tropes, of course — one of his labels is called Accidental, and his phenomenal 2003 mix CD for Berlin's hard-techno label Tresor, Let's All Make Mistakes, bore an epigraph from Samuel Beckett: "Fail again, fail better." Need I point out that it was mixed — at a time when so many mix CDs are painstakingly assembled beforehand, on computer — on two turntables, in real time, with not a little bit of wobbliness to a few of the transitions.
Accidents have played a huge role in contemporary music since at least the time of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, and quite frankly, the concept is beginning to wear a little thin. Around the turn of the century, between Oval's glitch music and the Clicks + Cuts compilations, electronic music became colonized by the error, with the role of the workaday "happy accident" in the creative process raised to the level of fetish. (Full disclosure: I contributed liner notes to Clicks + Cuts 2 and may bear some responsibility for such hyperbole. What can I say: we live, we learn.) Herbert himself had some responsibility for this, not only for his titles but also for his insistence upon an OULIPO-like method of creative constraints, outlined in the Personal Contract for the Composition of Music (or P.C.C.O.M.), that forbids the sampling of pre-recorded music and the use of drum machines and synthesizer presets, restricts his sound sources to the materials at hand and dictates such arcane technological rules as this one: "8. Samples themselves are not to be truncated from the rear. Revealing parts of the recording are invariably stored there."
Smirk if you must, but it works. What he means is that the tail end of any recording — a sample of smacking a screwdriver against a phone book in the kitchen, say — stores a surprising amount of information: the rattle of the dishes in the cabinets in the split second after the rubber handle goes thud against the newsprint and the marble below, and the high, lonesome sound that goes bouncing off the walls, that ambient aura called "room tone." Most of Herbert's drum sounds aren't drums; they're inspired (or maybe desperate) lunges at percussive possibility. And by cutting his samples as rough as a two-bit barber, he leaves in the possibility of all sorts of unintended, accidental micro-rhythms that give the track its bounce, its oomph, its ineffable funk.
Just listen to "A Machine Drilling for Oil" off his eponymous EP recorded as Radio Boy, the alias he reserves for politically inclined sonic editorials. A steadfast activist who rails against corporations, globalization, and governmental policy every chance he gets, Herbert identifies the sound sources in the title, presumably because knowing that oil drills will make you angry, and that will make the world a better place. (I simplify, and I'm probably wrong, because hey: here we are in an electronic-music column, talking about Big Oil. Have you noticed, though, how strange the weather has been lately?) We can also listen to this and think: Goddamn, he sure does know how to find a compelling rhythm in an otherwise formless din. Herbert's loops face off out of time and unconcerned for it, spinning into a Pachinko-caliber clatter of flippers and bells, but always above all musical. You may find his political praxis a wanting gesture, but that's OK: he fails better at making records.
Herbert didn't always concern himself so literally with the lofty (or the Lefty). For his 1998 album Around the House, he stuck to domestic quarters, capturing the kitchen and the bedroom via cutlery and creaky mattress springs, and wrapping around it all the quirks of his sampler and some sumptuous live keys. Check, in particular, "Never Give Up" and the Dani Siciliano-fronted "Going Round" to hear Herbert's populist, deep-house sensibilities at work, for nearly the last time; listen to the 12-minute "In the Kitchen" for an example of Herbert at his experimental best, spinning a moment of after-dinner cleanup into a thrumming, droning masterstroke of fluorescent noir.
By his 2001 album Bodily Functions, he was using the P.C.C.O.M. to formalize the methods that had proved most fruitful on Around the House, and the strategy clearly pays off. Twining an increasingly attentive approach to sampling with a rapidly maturing voice as a composer and songwriter, Herbert turns the raw material of Bodily Functions — the sound of friends and family and anonymous contributors brushing teeth and cracking knuckles, enriched with the singing of his then-partner Siciliano and carefully arranged live instrumentation — into something poignant, dramatic, soothing and romantic, both viscerally and intellectually arresting. "The Audience," "It's Only," "Foreign Bodies," "Suddenly," and "Leave Me Now" all stand among the best work of Herbert's career so far.
Herbert's ambitions have become grander in recent years. He has moved from solo studio experiments to grandiloquent big-band statements. The latter demonstrate, without a doubt, that Herbert is a Major Artist, versed in classic styles and songcraft, able to morph a waltzing jazz number into a taut techno workout in the space of 16 bars. But even as Herbert becomes a more sophisticated composer and producer, I remain drawn to his early work, remixes and oddities. His most recent release is actually a collection of such marginalia: Score, a collection of his work for film soundtracks (most of it released, some rejected) and one dance piece, surprises at every turn as he navigates the fusion of jazz combo and electronic music production as he's chosen to define it. To hear how weird that can get, listen to "Rendezvous," a composition for dance that takes Arvo Pärt-like harmonies and spins them into a chorus of wind-up cicadas.
It's particularly instructive to go back to Herbert's early recordings, recently collected and reissued on 100 lbs.. Way pre-P.C.C.O.M., this was Herbert in the midst of the UK's fertile post-rave period, young and so enamored of new technologies that he needed no other creative directive. Untreated drum machines, relatively conventional synths, and above all samples of other songs are the bone and sinew of these tracks — all processes he would later forgo in favor of his system of constraints. On "Rude," the breakbeat and sampled funk guitar aren't far off from those that peppered a thousand different dance cuts in the early '90s, but even working with such mundane source material, Herbert manages to infuse his collage-work with a lunging, lurching energy that's his alone. It would be hard to imagine much contemporary house music without Herbert's influence — from Akufen to Isolée to Luciano, Herbert's love of the lopsided crops up again and again — so it's fascinating to hear him beginning to tease out the outline of his style on relatively straightforward cuts like "Thinking of You," "Oo Licky" and "Take Me Back."
Finally, no assessment of Herbert's career would be complete without addressing his remixes, which number in the hundreds. Herbert's remixes of other musician's songs, like his own productions, have since 2000 been subject to the rules of P.C.C.O.M., with the additional stipulation that "Remixes should be completed using only the sounds provided by the original artist including any packaging the media was provided in." So while Herbert can't use a drum machine, for instance, to flesh out the raw material, he can snap the jewel case in two to create a cracking snare approximation. As with his own music, what seems like a convoluted process often yields surprisingly immediate results. His "Fully Flooded Mix" of Fridge's "Ark" runs the band's swelling post-rock through a particularly course sieve, turning backwards guitar into gloopy strips of Play-Doh, and twisting muddy noise into delicate jazz phrases (and back again). Only a fraction of Herbert's remixes can be found on eMusic, but his reworks of Jaga Jazzist, Beth Hirsch, dZihan and Kamian, Roy Ayers, Soft Pink Truth, Ennio Morricone and Jazzanova (the latter two as Doctor Rockit) are all essential downloads: proof that his magic touch is anything but accidental.
Accidents are one of Herbert's main tropes, of course — one of his labels is called Accidental, and his phenomenal 2003 mix CD for Berlin's hard-techno label Tresor, Let's All Make Mistakes, bore an epigraph from Samuel Beckett: "Fail again, fail better." Need I point out that it was mixed — at a time when so many mix CDs are painstakingly assembled beforehand, on computer — on two turntables, in real time, with not a little bit of wobbliness to a few of the transitions.
Accidents have played a huge role in contemporary music since at least the time of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, and quite frankly, the concept is beginning to wear a little thin. Around the turn of the century, between Oval's glitch music and the Clicks + Cuts compilations, electronic music became colonized by the error, with the role of the workaday "happy accident" in the creative process raised to the level of fetish. (Full disclosure: I contributed liner notes to Clicks + Cuts 2 and may bear some responsibility for such hyperbole. What can I say: we live, we learn.) Herbert himself had some responsibility for this, not only for his titles but also for his insistence upon an OULIPO-like method of creative constraints, outlined in the Personal Contract for the Composition of Music (or P.C.C.O.M.), that forbids the sampling of pre-recorded music and the use of drum machines and synthesizer presets, restricts his sound sources to the materials at hand and dictates such arcane technological rules as this one: "8. Samples themselves are not to be truncated from the rear. Revealing parts of the recording are invariably stored there."
Smirk if you must, but it works. What he means is that the tail end of any recording — a sample of smacking a screwdriver against a phone book in the kitchen, say — stores a surprising amount of information: the rattle of the dishes in the cabinets in the split second after the rubber handle goes thud against the newsprint and the marble below, and the high, lonesome sound that goes bouncing off the walls, that ambient aura called "room tone." Most of Herbert's drum sounds aren't drums; they're inspired (or maybe desperate) lunges at percussive possibility. And by cutting his samples as rough as a two-bit barber, he leaves in the possibility of all sorts of unintended, accidental micro-rhythms that give the track its bounce, its oomph, its ineffable funk.
Just listen to "A Machine Drilling for Oil" off his eponymous EP recorded as Radio Boy, the alias he reserves for politically inclined sonic editorials. A steadfast activist who rails against corporations, globalization, and governmental policy every chance he gets, Herbert identifies the sound sources in the title, presumably because knowing that oil drills will make you angry, and that will make the world a better place. (I simplify, and I'm probably wrong, because hey: here we are in an electronic-music column, talking about Big Oil. Have you noticed, though, how strange the weather has been lately?) We can also listen to this and think: Goddamn, he sure does know how to find a compelling rhythm in an otherwise formless din. Herbert's loops face off out of time and unconcerned for it, spinning into a Pachinko-caliber clatter of flippers and bells, but always above all musical. You may find his political praxis a wanting gesture, but that's OK: he fails better at making records.
Herbert didn't always concern himself so literally with the lofty (or the Lefty). For his 1998 album Around the House, he stuck to domestic quarters, capturing the kitchen and the bedroom via cutlery and creaky mattress springs, and wrapping around it all the quirks of his sampler and some sumptuous live keys. Check, in particular, "Never Give Up" and the Dani Siciliano-fronted "Going Round" to hear Herbert's populist, deep-house sensibilities at work, for nearly the last time; listen to the 12-minute "In the Kitchen" for an example of Herbert at his experimental best, spinning a moment of after-dinner cleanup into a thrumming, droning masterstroke of fluorescent noir.
By his 2001 album Bodily Functions, he was using the P.C.C.O.M. to formalize the methods that had proved most fruitful on Around the House, and the strategy clearly pays off. Twining an increasingly attentive approach to sampling with a rapidly maturing voice as a composer and songwriter, Herbert turns the raw material of Bodily Functions — the sound of friends and family and anonymous contributors brushing teeth and cracking knuckles, enriched with the singing of his then-partner Siciliano and carefully arranged live instrumentation — into something poignant, dramatic, soothing and romantic, both viscerally and intellectually arresting. "The Audience," "It's Only," "Foreign Bodies," "Suddenly," and "Leave Me Now" all stand among the best work of Herbert's career so far.
Herbert's ambitions have become grander in recent years. He has moved from solo studio experiments to grandiloquent big-band statements. The latter demonstrate, without a doubt, that Herbert is a Major Artist, versed in classic styles and songcraft, able to morph a waltzing jazz number into a taut techno workout in the space of 16 bars. But even as Herbert becomes a more sophisticated composer and producer, I remain drawn to his early work, remixes and oddities. His most recent release is actually a collection of such marginalia: Score, a collection of his work for film soundtracks (most of it released, some rejected) and one dance piece, surprises at every turn as he navigates the fusion of jazz combo and electronic music production as he's chosen to define it. To hear how weird that can get, listen to "Rendezvous," a composition for dance that takes Arvo Pärt-like harmonies and spins them into a chorus of wind-up cicadas.
It's particularly instructive to go back to Herbert's early recordings, recently collected and reissued on 100 lbs.. Way pre-P.C.C.O.M., this was Herbert in the midst of the UK's fertile post-rave period, young and so enamored of new technologies that he needed no other creative directive. Untreated drum machines, relatively conventional synths, and above all samples of other songs are the bone and sinew of these tracks — all processes he would later forgo in favor of his system of constraints. On "Rude," the breakbeat and sampled funk guitar aren't far off from those that peppered a thousand different dance cuts in the early '90s, but even working with such mundane source material, Herbert manages to infuse his collage-work with a lunging, lurching energy that's his alone. It would be hard to imagine much contemporary house music without Herbert's influence — from Akufen to Isolée to Luciano, Herbert's love of the lopsided crops up again and again — so it's fascinating to hear him beginning to tease out the outline of his style on relatively straightforward cuts like "Thinking of You," "Oo Licky" and "Take Me Back."
Finally, no assessment of Herbert's career would be complete without addressing his remixes, which number in the hundreds. Herbert's remixes of other musician's songs, like his own productions, have since 2000 been subject to the rules of P.C.C.O.M., with the additional stipulation that "Remixes should be completed using only the sounds provided by the original artist including any packaging the media was provided in." So while Herbert can't use a drum machine, for instance, to flesh out the raw material, he can snap the jewel case in two to create a cracking snare approximation. As with his own music, what seems like a convoluted process often yields surprisingly immediate results. His "Fully Flooded Mix" of Fridge's "Ark" runs the band's swelling post-rock through a particularly course sieve, turning backwards guitar into gloopy strips of Play-Doh, and twisting muddy noise into delicate jazz phrases (and back again). Only a fraction of Herbert's remixes can be found on eMusic, but his reworks of Jaga Jazzist, Beth Hirsch, dZihan and Kamian, Roy Ayers, Soft Pink Truth, Ennio Morricone and Jazzanova (the latter two as Doctor Rockit) are all essential downloads: proof that his magic touch is anything but accidental.
© 1992 - 2009 All Media Guide, LLC