In the world of dance music there is often little that's considered "real." The four-on-the-floor beat of a house record is inevitably created with a drum machine, the epic builds of a trance anthem are laid out with synthesizers and the backbeat of a jungle track is likely built out of a repeated drum loop -- playing over and over and over again. Just about the only thing that can be considered organic in most dance music is the vocal track, and even those are often sculpted with the help of samplers and effects.
Enter Matthew Herbert, the twenty-nine-year old British keyboardist, producer and DJ, whose manifesto for creating jazz-laced house music is all about keeping it real. Herbert's "Personal Contract for the Composition of Music" (PCCOM) reads, in part, "No drum machines [are allowed]. All keyboard sounds must be edited in some way: no factory presets or pre-programmed patches are allowed. No replication of traditional acoustic instruments is allowed where the financial and physical possibility of using the real ones exists. The inclusion, development, propagation, existence, replication, acknowledgement, patterns and beauty of what are commonly known as accidents, is encouraged. Furthermore, they have equal rights within the composition as deliberate, conscious, or premeditated compositional actions or decisions."
Sounds a bit highfalutin, but as Herbert explains it, the manifesto, which informed every song on the recent Bodily Functions (Studio !K7), was written to keep himself in check as he created the songs that make up the disc. Nearly every track contains samples of actual bodily functions, from the sound of a baby's early gurglings, to the cracking of knuckles and the coursing of blood through veins. As the liner notes for one track, "Foreign Bodies," reads: "All percussion taken from bodily function sounds kindly donated by strangers and friends around the world."
"It's interesting to know and understand people's process as they create music," Herbert says of the manifesto. "It's time we have a debate about sampling. To me it feels like an extension of consumerism, that someone has a right to take something an artist has done and claim it as their own. Are there alternatives that could have created something just as brilliant?"
Herbert, who grew up with a BBC radio engineer father, and no television, began music lessons at age four, and by age twelve was writing his own compositions. "Because I grew up without a television, I listened to a lot of radio and read a lot of books, I was very sensitive to sound, especially at night. I was definitely afraid of very, very tiny sounds. Part of this now is a way of sort of reclaiming these sounds for myself instead of them being threatening and frightening."
By college he was creating electro-acoustic music that was part melody and part performance art. Utilizing props like a bag of potato chips or glass bottles that he would smash as sound effects, he assured that every performance was somehow different. "If you're a musician in a concert hall and you miss a note, that's a terrible error; you never hear mistakes in classical performances. It was a slow realization by my mid-teens, that this type of precision is not necessarily all there is to music."
As he began producing dance tracks, releasing them under monikers ranging from Wishmountain to Radioboy to Doctor Rockit, and now finally simply under his surname, Herbert crafted a direction for himself that ended up becoming the manifesto. Bodily Functions follows a series of 12-inch releases, compilation albums, remixed tracks for everyone from Harold Budd to Moloko, and 1998's well-received Around the House. The new disc, which took more than seven years to complete, was a journey Herbert embarked upon with the expectation that the final product would be an extension of himself, and, he hoped, a soundtrack for both a quiet night at home, or a booming late-night on the dancefloor.
While all of the music was created by Herbert's own hands and microphones -- and samplers, and the occasional New Orleans funeral band -- the melodies and rhythms are inextricably linked to the sensual voice of San Franciscan Dani Sicilliano. Her airy lyrical turns, evoking recent thoughts of Bebel Gilberto, give a muted cohesion to the album of house tracks, backed by a thread of cocktail jazz from the Forties.
"Our work has always evolved out of our friendship," says Herbert of his collaborator for more than five years. "It makes it very hard sometimes to distinguish between the creative roles and where friendship starts or finishes. Even if they're songs that I've written entirely before playing them for her, I don't want it just to be a function of having her sing it. She brings something else to it."
Herbert's perfectionist qualities can force him to work on one track for more than two years. But he doesn't expect to take another seven to produce the follow-up to Bodily Functions. Now that the album is out there, he's ready to take his show on the road, and, hopefully build an audience for his unique brand of music.
"I wanted to create songs where if the power fell out on stage we could just play with a piano and a voice. But I also wanted to create recordings that could only have been made in the last couple of years. It's about trying to fuse those things together and create a third thing," he says. "Whether it works or not, is for the audience to decide, but that's the ambition."
ANDREW STRICKMAN
(June 13, 2001)