Matthew Herbert 'Scale' album

With his new album 'Scale', restless musical innovator Matthew Herbert has produced his most accessible and mellifluous song collection to date. In just a decade as a recording artist, Herbert has become Britain's most inventive and prolific electronic composer, recording under his own name as well as Doctor Rockit, Wishmountain, Radio Boy, Transformer and others. Globally respected beyond narrow scenes or genes, he has also produced and remixed artists as diverse as Björk, REM, John Cale, Roisin Murphy, Yoko Ono and Serge Gainsbourg.

'Scale' is a culmination of these achievements to date, containing echoes of all Herbert's musical identities. In a career spanning jazz, house, techno and avant-garde sample collages, his most frequent vocal collaborator has been his partner Dani Siciliano. The velvet-voiced chanteuse again features prominently on 'Scale' alongside the singers Neil Thomas and Dave Okumu, who fronts the band Jade Fox and has previously collaborated with SA-RA Creative Partners, 4 Hero, IG Culture, Courtney Pine and many more. The album also features a chamber orchestra, a woodwind section, French horns and many of the big band players heard on Herbert's 2003 album, 'Goodbye Swingtime'.

On the surface at least, 'Scale' is Herbert's smoothest and sweetest album so far. The overall tone is bright and opulent, the prevailing musical chatter a sophisticated conversation between luxuriant jazz, sumptuous disco and sensual house rhythms. In this grand ballroom of sound, silken ballads such as 'Something Isn't Right' or 'We're In Love' jostle for floorspace with syncopated, club-friendly tracks like 'The Movers And The Shakers' and 'Moving Like A Train'.

Elsewhere, Herbert's deep roots in experimental electronica and musique concrete come to the fore on the swirling, artfully deconstructed 'Birds Of A Feather' and the ultra-percussive montage 'Just Once'. Woozy and warm in feel, tunes like 'Harmonies' or 'Those Feelings' sound simultaneously avant-garde and soulful.

Herbert's last full-length release, 'Plat Du Jour' from 2005, was a highly political concept album that used the food industry as both sonic source material and subject matter. Beneath its deceptively glitzy surface, 'Scale' is no less serious, taking as a key theme the end of the oil era and the violence done in pursuit of this finite fossil fuel. But this is not an angry or even an overtly political record. Much like its sonic experiments, the subtext is subtle and playful.

"This record was designed to be more of a celebration," says Herbert. "The task I set myself was really just to revisit my song side. To try and do these songs in an interesting way but ultimately to just enjoy the melodies and harmonies. I didn't want the album to buckle under the weight of too many ideas, which 'Plat Du Jour' did at times. I don't want it to be like 'The Da Vinci Code', where people are trying to crack it. I'd rather be 'Foucault's Pendulum'."

In making 'Scale', Herbert also relaxed the Dogma-like restrictions of his self-imposed Personal Contract for the Composition of Music. Devised in 2000, the PCCOM prohibits the use of pre-set keyboard sounds, drum machines, or secondary musical sources. Mistakes and accidents also become key to the compositional process.

But, like any good scientist, Herbert knows rules are made to be broken. "I put the rules to one side for this record," he explains. "I just wanted to do whatever felt right, whatever allowed the songs to work in a spontaneous way. The irony is, by the end of it, I had probably stuck to 98 per cent of the rules anyway. For example, I certainly haven't sampled any other people's music on this record, but one track was made with 177 different messages left on an answerphone we set up specifically for the album."

Which explains the tiny photograph of an answerphone on the album cover, a collage of the 723 objects used in the making of 'Scale'. It may not be obvious on first listen, but beneath its subversively smooth surface the record contains recordings of coffins, petrol pumps, meteorites, an RAF Tornado bomber, and somebody being sick outside a banquet for a notorious London trade fair for international arms dealers.

Breaking another of Herbert's self-imposed rules, 'Scale' also features live drums recorded in bizarrely diverse conditions: under the sea, in a hot air balloon, in a labyrinth of subterranean caves, and in a car travelling at 100 miles per hour. "I wanted to record them on fire as well," he says, "but we never got around to doing that. Maybe next time."

Most of the unusual objects on 'Scale' were deployed in groups of 12, a thematic nod to the western musical scale of 12 notes. But the album title also has another meaning: scale as in perspective, the means to gauge the distance between past and present, childhood and adulthood, personal contentment and global discontent. Finding a way to measure his own life as a successful musician with freedom against a global backdrop of war, poverty and inequality.

"Hopefully the album still has that celebratory quality, even though it's a kind of sad," Herbert concludes. "To be honest I'm pissed off with myself. I wanted to write an upbeat pop record, but I didn't. You can't do that when Dick Cheney is in control. The world is so messy at the moment, I couldn't bring myself to do it. But I would really like this record to be considered upbeat. It's designed to be enjoyable."

Ah, but 'Scale' is much more than enjoyable. It is a sumptuous banquet of soulful pop made with integrity, intelligence and invention. Proof that, even in troubled times, the best music can be both playful and political, serious and sublime. It is all just a question of scale.

Biography

Restless innovator, sampling wizard, classically trained pianist and superstar collaborator, MATTHEW HERBERT is one of electronic music's most versatile and prolific figureheads. Recording under his own name as well as Doctor Rockit, Wishmountain, Radio Boy and others, Herbert has also produced and remixed artists as diverse as Björk, REM, John Cale, Roisin Murphy, Yoko Ono and Serge Gainsbourg.

An alchemist of avant-garde sound in the tradition stretching from Stockhausen to the Aphex Twin, Herbert combines playful pop sensibility with a strictly imposed experimental agenda. In his increasingly conceptual and political albums he has emerged as a unique figure in modern music: a kind of one-man Radiohead, or a Brian Eno for the 21st century.

It was in January 1995 that Herbert gave his first large public performance. His instruments: a sampler and a bag of crisps. But long before he discovered the revolutionary possibilities of sampling, he began playing violin and piano at the age of four. When he was seven he sang in the school choir and played with orchestras. At school, he had the good fortune to have a music teacher who considered Reich, Xenakis and Jazz standards to be the equal of Beethoven. During his time as a theatre student at Exeter University, Herbert, the son of a BBC sound technician, continued to invest in his own home studio.

Herbert's studies helped to germinate his interest in "musique concrete". Rummaging around his bag of crisps was only the beginning. His 1998 masterwork 'Around the House' (re-released on !K7 in 2002) collected sounds from the house and home: washing machines, toasters and toothbrushes were sampled and processed into swinging grooves and absorbing sound scapes. All the project needed was the silken voice of Dani Siciliano, Herbert's long-term collaborator, to humanise the album into a left-field classic.

In 2000, Herbert wrote a manifesto, the "Personal Contract for the Composition Of Music (PCCOM) (Incorporating the Manifesto of Mistakes)", rules which have defined the compositional methods ever since. The manifesto, not unlike Dogme 95's filmic principles, prohibits the use of any pre-recorded musical sources, as well as any synthetic sounds that imitate acoustic instruments.

Furthermore, accidental sounds or errors should influence the process of his production. Herbert considers mistakes in programming or recording as the welcome intervention of random humanity in a sterile world. This is a man, after all, who runs a record label called Accidental.

Deriving much of its musical content from human skin, hair, bones and the random contents of Dani Siciliano's handbag, Herbert's 2001 album 'Bodily Functions' was
the audible result of putting this theory to practice. But far from being limited by these self-imposed rules, the record unlocked rich new vaults of unique sound and fascinating rhythm from the most unlikely everyday objects.

In 2003 Herbert redefined his musical agenda yet again with his big-band album 'Goodbye Swingtime', which was recorded at Abbey Road studios with 16 jazz and
session musicians. Despite its self-consciously traditional elements, the album was
composed under strict PCCOM rules, and again featured Siciliano on vocals. The subsequent live shows, including Sonar in Barcelona, the Montreux jazz festival, and Roskilde festival in Denmark, were rapturously received by large crowds.

From bedroom samplers to concert halls, Herbert continues to expand the horizons of electro-organic music.

The political content of Herbert's music has become increasingly overt in recent years. His 2004 album 'Plat Du Jour' was his most rigorously experimental to date, featuring sounds entirely derived from food and its packaging. Unified in concept and content, it used witty culinary metaphors to attack not just giant food companies but also the death penalty, body fascism and war in Iraq. In Britain, 'The Guardian' called the consequent live shows, complete with a chef making live smells "a wild stimulation of senses, feet and intellect".

In 2005, Herbert produced 'Ruby Blue', the debut solo album by Moloko singer Roisin Murphy. A fertile garden of flamboyant dance-pop and artfully textured jazz-funk.

Herbert's latest album, 'Scale', is probably his most pleasingly pop-friendly mellifluous so far. But beneath its deceptively glossy surface sheen of jazz, disco and sensual house rhythms lie quietly anguished meditations on mortality, global suffering and the end of the oil age. Among the 723 objects sampled on these lush tracks are coffins, petrol pumps, meteorites, an RAF Tornado bomber, and somebody being sick outside a banquet for a notorious London arms fair. More than any previous Herbert album, 'Scale' combines immaculately groomed dance music with subversive subject matter.

Herbert is as solid as a rock in these times of "borderless digital arbitrariness," as the German newspaper 'Die Zeit' once described his work. Between programming mistakes and the conceptual stringency of his PCCOM manifest, between divine accident and strict intent, whether he scores films or theatre shows or paints the musical backdrop for fashion shows - Herbert's endless innovation and transgression of genres is never just art for its own sake. His music is always engaged in lively dialogue with the wider world, with the past and future of experimental music, with its own political and economic origins.

Crucially, in most cases, you can also dance to it.
Matthew Herbert's records are true weapons of mass seduction.

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Matthew Herbert - Scale