England's Matthew Herbert is known more for his musical process than his actual output. His work is guided by his "Contract for the Composition of Music" manifesto, a kind of Dogma 95-style treatise on music-making in the information age. Herbert frowns on sampling other music, synthesizer pre-sets, and drum machines, and gives the thumbs-up to human error (his 2000 mix CD is titled Let's All Make Mistakes). His self-imposed limitations have driven him to include a certain amount of acoustic instrumentation, including his own accomplished piano work, while pointing him toward unusual sound sources for his rhythmic sequencing.
On 2001's overlooked gem Bodily Functions, he borrowed some of the sound sources Matmos used on A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure, made his own recordings of organic phenomena, and incorporated the lot into subtle, elegant pop music that alternated between effortless house tracks and vaguely loungy acoustic jazz. When I first heard Bodily Functions I almost couldn't believe how good it was, but when I looked to others to share my enthusiasm, the responses were decidedly mixed. Some heard genius in the album; others failed to connect with Herbert at all, while still others praised his earlier Around the House album as vastly superior. As fate would have it, Around the House, originally released in 1998, has now been reissued.
If Bodily Functions had some stylistic parallels with Matmos' A Chance to Cut, Around the House is more closely aligned with the San Francisco duo's Quasi Objects. As on that early Matmos effort, Herbert integrated the sounds of objects in and around his home into his songs. The comparisons should really stop there, though, because Herbert's musical goals are completely different. Herbert is a song man bent on crafting relaxed, tasteful and ultimately very danceable tunes, and his use of the field recordings differs sharply. Unlike Matmos, Herbert has no respect for the integrity of the sources and shows little interest in using the original context as a reference point. The effect of whatever esoteric sampling methods are used are essentially inaudible on Around the House, but what emerges loud and clear is another exceptional and creative album.
As on the later Bodily Functions, the songs on Around the House are voiced by the sultry Dani Siciliano. She sings on just under half the tracks, and the rest consist of either instrumental house numbers (still rife with vocal samples) or moodier, more experimental pieces. The album's highlight comes early in the form of "So Now...", its first real track after a short bit of ambient foolery. Even after hearing it 30 times or more in the last week, this song has me hitting the "back" button like a Skinnerian pigeon aching for a food pellet. It has a lush and spacious rhythmic backdrop, comprised of little more than a clicking pseudo-snare, a house thump and a simple, round bassline. But the vocals are what make it special. The call-and-response interplay between Siciliano's lead and the breathy backup singers is gorgeous, the kind of music I imagine Prince composing after God finally calls the Purple One 2 Heaven.
Almost as accomplished is the sunny, uptempo "Going Round," which alludes just slightly to the jazz fixation that would flower on Bodily Functions. Even more instructive for these comparisons is "The Last Beat," which appears in different forms on both albums. As is typical of the differences between the two records, the version here is a bit more electronic and focused on ambience-- the full-on torch song approach that marks the most recent record was more of a flicker at this stage. In lieu of gently brushed cymbals, the song gives a percussive shape to a tangle of static.
A handful of brilliant tracks stand out on the remainder of the album, from light, warm and just-plain-beautiful instrumental house ("Close to Me," "We Still Have (The Music)") to gurgling ambient tracks thick with nuanced sound design and brilliant arrangements ("We Go Wrong"), to tracks that morph from one mode into the next ("This Time"). I would not personally rate Around the House quite as high as Bodily Functions, but this could well be a matter of which record I heard first. Herbert was a bit more focused on sound than song on this record, but the overall approach is not markedly different. Both albums are loaded with music of exceptionally high quality.
