Even if you've never heard Matthew Herbert's music, it's still quite possible you know how he makes it. For more than a decade, the British producer has made sample-driven house music that has elevated the concept of musique concrète (the fetishization of found sounds) into a storytelling platform. Where early composers Pierre Schaeffer and Edgar Varése sampled their surroundings-- often indiscriminately-- out of a sense of curiosity and playfulness, Herbert has turned the physical act of sampling itself into part of the text. 2005's food industry-themed Plat du Jour, for example, included samples of 3,255 people biting into an apple, chopsticks drumming on egg cups, and someone blowing over the top of a bottle of San Pellegrino.
This kind of sampling isn't merely a spice in Herbert's work; it's the basis for it. Any given album might feature hundreds of similarly interesting footnotes, many of which are rooted in larger cultural memes or personal anecdotes. As you might imagine, it's become nearly impossible to listen to Herbert's music without some sort of accompanying crib sheet for context. Correspondingly, it's become increasingly difficult to extract the novelty of his process from the quality of his output. Might you enjoy this album's "One Life" a little bit less had you not known that it sampled the incubator that kept Herbert's son alive for two months? By being his most musically inferior album in a long time, these are the kinds of questions that There's Me and There's You forces on the listener.
This is the second album from Herbert's Big Band outfit, and while the handle implies an aesthetic shift from electronic music to avant-jazz, the effect isn't as pronounced as it reads on paper-- Herbert's always mined from both genres regardless of his moniker. As with Plat du Jour and 2006's terrific Scale, it's also a protest album: his original concept was to record it entirely out of sounds sampled inside Britain's House of Parliament, a request which the government eventually denied. His frustration at that denial has manifested in songs with stronger, more overtly global and political themes than before; each beep in the aforementioned "One Life" represents 100 deaths resulting from the Iraq War; "The Story" features the rustling and crinkling of select British broadsheets and glossy celeb-obsessed tabloids; "The Yessness" features snippets from 100 figures of power saying the y-word, and, perhaps most notably, "Knowing" is a social experiment that finds 100 volunteers from around the world (of which, full disclosure, this writer is one, even if I can't figure out which "you" is mine) each contributing one word to the song's snaking melody.
So yeah, the tricks are clever; unfortunately, musically, There's Me... is an overstuffed mess. Its songs aren't compositions so much as overlong, hypercaffeinated patchworks of disparate vocal vamps, noxious brass motifs, and uncharacteristically obnoxious asides. Herbert's collaborations often hinge on his vocalists, and in that department, even though he's often veered dangerously close towards adult contemporary sensibilities, he's generally shown a taste for singers with subtle, light inflections. There's Me... finds him working for the first time with Zimbabwe-born Eska Mtungwazi, a vocalist whose range, while impressive, makes no allowances for subtlety. Songs like "Pontificate", "Waiting", "The Yessness", and "Breathe" (none of them great shakes to begin with) are overwhelmed by her spotlight-seeking mannerisms. She squeaks, whispers, bleats, purrs, and over-emotes in perfect synchronicity with the music's many needless hairpin turns; it's all pretty much as tiring and joyless as it sounds.
On paper, Herbert's sampling exercises read as thoughtful and as antagonistic as ever (one track features volunteers dispensing Britney Spears' noxious "Curious" fragrance throughout the halls of the British Museum). Without the music to support them, though, they end up feeling more like stunts, supplementary rather than complementary. Lots has been written about Herbert's elevation of process, particularly as it pertains to electronic music, and when it's all said and done, he's probably going to go down as one of sample-based music's most interesting and innovative thinkers, but There's Me... is a sign that he's overcorrected a bit too hard in that direction. This was probably a hugely satisfying record for him to make; it's a shame it's not nearly as much fun to listen to.
