Matthew Herbert - The Dynamics of Destruction

Recording the sound of a book by Noam Chomsky.

Recording the sound of a book by Noam Chomsky falling to the floor.

Matthew Herbert's entire body of work can be summed up in a single sample. His artistic statement of intent, the methodology of early French musique concrète updated to the demands of post-global dissent, finds its purest expression there.

Summarily confined to the pre- and post-millennium electronic universe, Matthew Herbert's output has from the very start refused, uncompromisingly, to play along with the stylistic pigeonholing of its era. His method unfolds into an eclectic, hyper-self-aware art that, by probing music in the full breadth of its expressive range, restores to it some of its lost meanings. To "making music" he hands back its atrophied epistemological dimension, and to the act of listening its most immediately and actively perceptive aspect. Everything is reunited in a total, ambiguous, intellectual experience that nonetheless never forgets its feet.

Herbert's distinctiveness ultimately lies in this crucial detail: concealing, behind a musical form that is never the same twice – a form that has at various times resembled techno-house, orchestral art-pop, concrete avant-garde, without ever being fully any one of these – a vast quantity of grey matter and one of the most rigorous political commitments around.

So rigorous, in fact, that it has led him to systematically turn down six-figure advertising deals and high-profile promotional festival slots.

The "culture of war," the global diktats of export processing zones, the relentless spectacle-ization of every crevice of lived experience. It would be too easy to spew out disgust at all this in public and build oneself a new idol in the process. With the class of an English gentleman of another era, Herbert chooses a more refined path, one that at every step reserves for itself the privilege of ambivalence, as well as an analytical intelligence that must be acknowledged even when the artistic outcome has proved controversial.

Let's try to piece together the links in the biography of contemporary music-making's most brilliant and authoritative thinker.

Music is over

“Music is over; music is dead. Of course there's still great music out there, with great musicians and great experiences. But as a form, it's finished, it's just a way of killing time while waiting for the next big thing. And more and more music today is starting to sound conservative, if not downright stupid. And that's an incredible thing, when you think about the great revolution that's hit us: namely the fact that you can make music out of literally anything. And yet so many people are still out there learning guitar and drum machines. Of course you can still make excellent music with a guitar or a drum machine, I dabble in it myself. But as soon as I do, I realize how predictable, unsatisfying, unimaginative and lazy it is. And how there's a far deeper option in front of us. Namely that it's possible to make music out of literally anything."

The backdrop of Herbert's universe clearly puts down roots on one side in the fraught political landscape of the glittering Eighties, and on the other in the author's own personal history. The son of a BBC sound engineer, Herbert grew up "surrounded by microphones, cables, volumes of Marx and a piano," became acquainted early on with Pierre Schaeffer's theories, and developed in a refined way the healthy and increasingly rare art of looking around oneself, both sonically and sociologically: still a teenager, he first got his hands on the DX7 (a Yamaha-made keyboard) and his father's home tape recorder, gradually gravitating toward the latter, a surrogate for the then-pricier DAT, right up until the commercial release of the machine that, more than any other, would throw open the full range of compositional options now available – the sampler.

It was in those same years, moreover, that the first symptoms of global culture took hold: MTV, fast-food chains, the canonization of shopping malls, the universalization of tastes and forms, the settling of skylines, geographies, bodies and minds.

Though far removed from rock's expressive models, Herbert developed a radical rejection of the emerging cultural order and a typically "punk" sense of protest, with few equivalents in contemporary electronic and experimental scenes.

The idea, the artistic-philosophical framework into which everything fits, thus brings together the visions of the two great Schaeffers on either side of the Atlantic: Pierre and Robert Murray. The world as noise and noise as instrument. The world as sonic composition, to be recognized at the level of the senses and actively engaged with in light of newly acquired awareness.

It's from this perspective that predetermined structures, the cult of the drum machine, and the use of stereotyped, if not outright pre-programmed sounds, radically lose their meaning, reduced to sterile compositional shortcuts that dull the creative potential inherent in the act of listening itself. By contrast, error and accident rise to the status of privileged means, and every sound/noise returns to live in its original dimension as a unique, unrepeatable event.

A particularly telling anecdote finds Herbert in the middle of a live selection at a club somewhere in Germany. Suddenly the power goes out and the whole set has to be scrapped. "It's life," the composer proclaims, "makes me feel warm inside."

Herbert nonetheless took his first steps in the music business discreetly, acting more the reformer than the revolutionary. The first half of the Nineties, while he completed his studies in electro-acoustic composition and turned up here and there as a keyboardist in a jazz outfit, was spent mostly exploring the possibilities of sound synthesis, with a particular eye toward its "popular" applications.

True to his love of black music (among the Englishman's first musical loves were, in fact, Marvin Gaye and disco music), he focused his attention above all on the house scene, especially the New York and Chicago schools (the acid wave in particular), but also on their thrilling export influences, which by the end of the Eighties had melted a buttoned-up England into the ecstatic delirium of the "summer of love".

Thanks then to a remarkable dexterity with machines, which he approached with a personal, painstaking touch, to a generally favorable climate – house music as a free, independent social situation – as well as to a surname that was anything but unfamiliar in the scene, Herbert quickly earned a reputation as a top-tier DJ and remixer, while still staying well away from the genre's spotlight.

His first work, in fact, Letsallmakemistakes – Globus Mix n.5 (1995), a hybrid collection of his own compositions and remixes, received precious little recognition outside the circle of industry insiders.

The compilation, part of a six-volume Tresor series, brilliantly embodies his intentions, disguised behind the facade of a DJ selection.

Herbert puts together twenty-two tracks across more than seventy minutes of engaging, dynamic techno-house groundwork. Amid top-tier names like Theo Parrish, Nightmare On Wax, Moloko (with the ultra-classic "Sing It Back"), Isolée and Plastikman, several aliases of dubious origin surface: RadioBoy, Doctor Rockit, Wishmountain, Mr. Vertigo, Best Boy Electric – all aliases that, as we'd later discover, lead back to a single creator. Namely Herbert himself. The collection thus flows in an incredibly solid and cohesive way, with Herbert's touches in the mixing stage, beyond the occasional synth pass, coming exclusively from technical "mistakes" (with the superb work on Hombre Ojo's "La Musica" easily ranking among the most inspired remixes ever made).

Once again, it's a live performance that proves prophetic: during a memorable festival set, Herbert picked up a bag of chips, crumpled it, tore it apart, capturing the sounds until he'd built a minimal-techno track, leaving the crowd stunned.

The evolution of ours continues right along the pavement of this electro aesthetic, progressively corrupted in form and content. A compilation of several EPs released between 1995 and 1996, 100Lbs is the magnificent summation of all this. Herbert tosses out drum machines altogether and relies exclusively on samples, personally recorded sounds and vocal cut-ups, slotted into minimal-leaning tech-house structures only sporadically bolstered by hyper-processed synth phrases.

100Lbs flows for a full seventy-plus minutes without a single misstep, stylistically crossing the electronic territories typical of the Nineties (basically everything sitting between house music and techno-ambient), with terse synthetic melodies and a jazzy aura filling out this improbable "concrete" dancefloor with a cyanotic yet no less fascinating appearance of warmth.

If, on one hand, tracks like "Thinking Of You", "Resident" or the sticky synth of "Desire" manage the about-face of sounding perfectly like exactly what they appear to be - namely excellent, irresistible dancefloor fillers - a good part of the album instead favours more abstract, jagged solutions, deconstructing and questioning the stereotypes of so-called "macho-music" (a Herbert-ian definition) in the direction of a spastic, isolationist clubbing. With humility, and a dash of irony.

Ultimately, though, what also comes through in the grooves of 100Lbs is a general sense of positivity and optimism. As Herbert himself would later admit, 100Lbs is in some way a manifesto of its times, of the materialisation of a distinctly European electronic scene, of the euphoric - if provisional - relief of a post-Thatcherite England. A liberating, genuine positivity that, in a sense, could hardly have expressed itself in forms other than these ambiguous techno-house upbeats, through the innovative compositional technique the Londoner experiments with here, and through its evolution into trance surges ("100Lbs") or quasi-ambient passages ("Deeper", the long coda of "See You On Monday").

Even with the restlessness of a structure already looking beyond itself, Herbert thus delivered his most effective and brilliant take on the club-electronic universe of the time, with the touch of class and the critical edge of an outsider.

Herbert would then go on to deepen his experiments with concrete samples by hiding behind other aliases, almost as if to keep, at least at this stage, a distinction between his more "popular"-leaning work and his more avant-garde excursions.

1997 saw the release of The Music Of Sound, a full-length album under the name Doctor Rockit. The record grew out of a vast trove of sounds captured during stops on his DJ sets around the four corners of the globe.

Sounds from shopping centres, airports, underpasses, crowded bars and all sorts of objects are chopped up and recontextualised into structures more relaxed than the beats of 100Lbs, going as far as to deliberately flirt with "chill out" aesthetics.

Despite its relative dryness and its exploration of micro-detail, The Music Of Sound always keeps itself on the threshold of listening pleasure - an ambivalence that would go on to inaugurate a long tradition in the composer's discography. Thus, from Balkan cafés to omnipresent TV commercials, from elevator muzak to air-conditioned Asian islands, the tragicomedy of rampant, spectacularised global economics unfolds, all laid over the apparent tranquillizer of a gentle downtempo sound, when not outright "catchy" (the faint melodies of "Runner On Hasting Beach" or "A Quiet Week In The House", through to the jazzy skit of "Fruit Cocktail"), with the snake of self-parody always ready to slither in on a more active, analytical listen.

The Herbert machine had thus officially been set in motion, ready to express itself very soon after at its most fertile potential.

The last beat

The summa of this first stage of Herbert-thought, aimed at combining sample experimentation with a softness of sound vaguely traceable to the electronic trends of the time, while at the same time anticipating their immediately subsequent developments, arrived just a few months later under the name Around The House.

Built on an enormous mass of sounds personally captured in "domestic" settings (cutlery, intercoms, toothbrushes, glasses and dripping sinks), Around The House would not be what it is, however, without another fundamental prerequisite: Dani Siciliano.

Born in the outskirts of Arizona and relocated to San Francisco with her father, a Department Of Defense official, Siciliano was at the time building up experience as a self-taught jazz vocalist, working by day as a housekeeper and by night as a DJ in the city's house clubs.

It's during an American stay of the Herberts, in 1995, that the unassuming cleaning woman comes into contact with Matthew. The two strike up a friendship and keep in touch until Herbert invites her to London to try recording something together. Shortly after, they would be married.

That's how Around The House loads up on multiple meanings starting with that "house" in the title — an obvious genre reference, yet one that's deconstructed and shifted in meaning, serving as the neutral heading for an inventory of sounds used, as well as a clue to ironic coincidences from Herbert's own life.

"So Now" opens the album with an excellent house flow, a distant relative of the killer tracks on 100Lbs, though with softer edges and a more liquid feel, favouring a decidedly more minimal approach (people would indeed start talking about micro-house) that brings out sinuous, highly effective grooves that are never so exposed on the surface. Completing the embrace is the velvet of Dani Siciliano, a discreet and elegant voice of evanescent splendour, like an old white soul icon reincarnated as a trip-hop cat on acid, whom Herbert manages to dole out sparingly and skilfully within the album's compositional design.

All of this feeds into the markedly soulful vein of Around The House and much of what would follow under the Herbert name, thickening that vivid human component that distinguishes and makes every one of the Englishman's productions literally pulse with life.

Siciliano's contribution, though, seems to leave its mark on the variety of stylistic choices too, not just in the pronounced jazz imprint — a direction Herbert had only tentatively explored up to that point ("I converted to the sampler simply because, honestly, I always sucked as a traditional composer," he would wryly admit) and which here blossoms for the first time in a disorienting pseudo-piano ballad like "The Last Beat" — but also in the more overtly experimental territories that transcend any genre definition known at the time. Case in point is "This Time", probably among Herbert's absolute masterpieces: subcutaneous tech-house weighed down by an unidentifiable sample, slowed into a kind of ambient loop, with Dani Siciliano's vocals — a single line taking shape out of a chopped-up cut-up — evolving into a brief but glorious apotheosis only right at the end.

Other memorable tracks, like the fiery "Going Round" and the sprawling "We Still Have (The Music)" — perhaps the only moment truly close to 100Lbs — pull off their guise as upscale dancefloor numbers brilliantly, while hiding, just beneath the surface, the workings of something macabrely at odds with all that: a wry send-up of the increasingly commercialised house imaginary, taken to the point of representing it through the scandalous banality of domestic noise.

"In The Kitchen" is exactly that, and much more besides: a twelve-minute pièce built entirely around the sample of a dripping sink, which progressively evolves into a rhythmic bed of unspeakable melancholy over which the most disparate household sounds take turns, in a genuine elegy to the creativity of the act of listening, and to listening as a form of total understanding.

As if to say: house music brought back, for the first time, to its unexplored, most literal meaning.

Matthew Herbert's incredible strength, in the end, lies precisely in this double track: on one hand, the almost scientific skill with which he manages to compose numbers that are perfectly danceable and able to blend into the moderately experimental house and techno selections of the era; on the other, the intellectual substratum hidden within the very structure, an opportunity for further symbolic investigation and reversals of meaning.

In this too, Around The House marks the definitive turning point in Herbert's biography, setting the standard upon which much of his subsequent pop-oriented output would be built.

That same year, meanwhile, Herbert revived the old Wishmountain moniker, under which he released the albums Wishmountain and Wishmountainisdead, works of a more overtly concretist nature that recall the contemporaneous experiments of Matmos (probably the only real contemporary parallel to Herbert's work, albeit with some important aesthetic and stylistic distinctions).

With the new millennium, Herbert's mission grows even more complex, refining the physical-cerebral duet of his early compositions to include more overtly political reflections, as well as musings on the very meaning of making music within the double-speed, 2.0 dynamics of globalisation.

It was when I started sampling Starbucks frappuccinos and McDonald's burgers that I suddenly realised how the simple act of recording a sound is actually a powerful political act. How much it could say about all these things I didn't particularly like and that were changing our landscape, our minds, and our stories. And so I set out to make punk records.

2001 is probably the (anti-)global year par excellence. Chomsky and Naomi Klein are the most widely read and quoted voices. Washington. Seattle. Genoa. Afghanistan.

Herbert serves as an unsettling artistic echo to all of this, delivering, among other things, some of his best-known productions ever.

At this point, another stroke of genius from the clever Englishman deserves yet another necessary digression.

At the end of 2000, Herbert published what became known as P.C.C.O.M., the "Personal Contract for the Composition of Music [Incorporating Mistakes]", a kind of manifesto aimed primarily at himself, which laid out the compositional imperatives and taboos of Herbert's thinking.

Among the commandments, for example, we find the following:

a) the use of already existing sounds is not permitted: drum-machines, synthesizers, presets;

b) only sounds generated at the start of the compositional process, or taken from the artist's personal archive, may be sampled;

c) sampling other people's music is strictly forbidden;

d) the inclusion, development, propagation, existence, replication, recognition, rights, patterns and beauty of what is commonly known as "error" are encouraged;

e) all fx parameters must be set manually; factory settings or pre-programmed presets are not allowed;

f) the list of sounds and equipment used must be made public.

In this spirit of political demands mixed with a precise and rigorous artistic design, 2001 saw the release, as a free download under the name Radio Boy, of The Mechanics Of Destruction, in some respects Herbert's "punk record", and the true watershed moment in his discography.

The album is a collection of fifteen tracks that each take aim at a product, symbol, banner, myth or promoter of the global economy. From Gap to Starbucks, from the Hollywood industry to Henry Kissinger, from oil to GMOs. The record opens with the chatter inside a Japanese McDonald's before it dissolves into the suffocating tangle of assembly-line sounds and rhythms derived exclusively from the components of a "Big Mac meal". This time around, Herbert does nothing to dilute the recipe or reassemble it into a more or less digestible form: the tracks are deliberately left to speak in all their rawness and jaggedness, from the resonance of a Coke can to a crumpled page of The Sun (the track is dedicated to Rupert Murdoch...), all the way to the voices of London protests against the exploitation in Rwanda. The noise-sounds are dissected and reassembled into improvised post-global danses macabres, with no mediation between the source object and the listener, who in this suffocating spectacle is forced into an awareness and a rethinking of the three-way relationship between themselves, their acoustic universe, and its symbolic and political implications.

The Mechanics Of Destruction was thus the first, and perhaps the most flagrantly provocative, work - in every sense of the word - by the English musician. But only the first in a long series.

Also in 2001, Herbert collaborated with Björk and Matmos on the album "Vespertine". As with every co-credit on the Icelandic star's records, the feature blessed Herbert with an unexpected boost in visibility, earning him a certain notoriety and following within typically indie circles for at least the following five years. On this occasion, Herbert also strengthened his friendship with the San Francisco duo, in his own way pushing back against the "fatally individualistic and isolationist" tendency of contemporary electronic music, renewing a relationship of mutual esteem that would soon culminate in a collaboration all of its own.

It was precisely out of the sessions for "A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure", the Matmos album released that same year, that the partnership emerged which would shortly afterwards lead to Bodily Functions.

Herbert brought in Schmidt and Daniel with a project in mind similar in content to the theme of "A Chance To Cut" (surgery, the exploration of bodily sounds and their legitimization as popular artistic reference points) but far more complex in form and allusion. The three of them put together a huge database of sounds and fragments sourced from operating theatres, ultrasounds, blood tests, liposuctions, plastic surgeries, bodily fluids, organic material and assorted medical equipment, some of it donated by friends and followers. Distancing himself, however, from the work of Matmos, more didactic and "surgical" in privileging source material as an interpretive factor, albeit with their typical tongue-in-cheek approach, Herbert set himself the further challenge of assembling it all so as to render the formula ambiguous within a pop-friendly sauce, whose conceptual depth would remain merely one looming interpretive possibility among many.

Stylistically, then, Bodily Functions builds on the coordinates already established with Around The House - jazz, vocals, house music - pushing the tones even further in the directions already set out: while the house scaffolding becomes more introverted, to the point of being completely dismantled (only the solid beats of "It's Only", the single "The Audience" and the garage flourishes of "You Saw It All" remain), the organic component takes on an ever greater role, enriched with Rhodes piano, horns and percussion, until it wraps the listening experience in an alienated, stylish form of elevator music.

Dani Siciliano's voice, although vocal credits also extend to Luca Santucci and Shingai Shoniwa, is more central here than ever. More independent and personal, Mrs. Herbert's contributions play a functional role, slotting perfectly into the record's lounge-like dimension, while also helping, on the lyrical side, to sustain a game of double meanings with exquisitely perverse results. Each lyric, in fact, oscillates freely across a multitude of interpretations, presenting Bodily Functions, on a surface level, as the typical stew of amorous and sensual torments, while on a slightly more analytical level as a grotesque poem in stanzas by a patient under the knife of her plastic surgeon.

Deeper still, finally, one glimpses the most hidden of the interpretive layers, the one anchored to the references of the samples, made even more impenetrable by Herbert's wish to keep the context of much of the sampling material secret.

Yet the petrifying intro of "You're Unknown To Me" is enough to give a vague idea of all this: an electro-pianistic serenade to a distant, imagined platonic love. If the curious surgical metaphor shows Siciliano lying hesitantly on a clinic bed, watched over by a scalpel, shifting focus to what seemed like an innocuous finger-snap, in light of the credits we realize instead that it's the sound of an ultrasound of a fetus at risk of miscarriage. And so that mysterious stranger of the title is drastically flipped in meaning.

On these tones flow the fourteen tracks of an album that, musically too, communicates effectively on multiple levels. It's hard to resist the nocturnal tech-house pulse of "It's Only", with a honeyed, stiletto-heeled Siciliano grappling with an improbable torch song of noir contours (more or less like the erotic thriller of the video), or the unsettling Moloko-esque poses of "Leave Me Now"; hard not to melt with "Suddenly", jazzy pop marching to an ambient-house beat and wrapped in a light anesthetized ecstasy (“So suddenly / These creases are folding in and up/ And closing/ Suddenly I’m free to fall/ Far away from it all/ But i can’t move at all”); nearly impossible not to applaud the unmatched command of a track like "The Audience", a micro-house gem touched by Rhodes keys and a masterful, extremely elegant pan-lesbian duet between Siciliano and Shoniwa, probably among the genre's absolute high points.

Released on the esteemed !K7 and well received on multiple fronts (the videos paradoxically end up in MTV's airplay...), Bodily Functions remains the most atypical and captivating album contemporary electronic music has known, a maze of riddles and depth that is hardly replicable, and one that establishes Herbert not only as the unchallenged master of sampling but also as an authoritative postmodern composer of manifold, cross-genre potential.

As the excellent compilation Secondhand Sounds (2002) comes out, celebrating Herbert's work as a celebrated "avant-garde" remixer (among the old and new credits: Motorbass, Mono, Nils Petter Molvaer, Moloko, up to "Bonnie & Clyde" by Serge Gainsbourg), his efforts turn precisely toward instrumental composition and the possibilities of convincingly integrating it into his sonic-conceptual universe.

For the occasion, he puts together the puppet-ensemble The Matthew Herbert Big Band and, as a further sign of a definitive emancipation from any record-label or genre constraint, founds his own label, Accidental Records, on which almost all of his work will appear from now on.

Goodbye Swingtime (2003) will be the immediate product of all this. Centered on a more precise – and sharper – political dimension (state propaganda, the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the "weapons" of mass communication), Matthew Herbert produces perhaps his first truly fully-fledged album entirely outside any known stylistic category: it's no longer a house inflection, nor lounge-café cocktail music, nor cool jazz tout court. The ideas here multiply into a series of alternately familiar models that, once combined, merge into an unusual and destabilizing form. A temporally skewed retrofuturism. A pop avant-garde marching in swing time toward a journey to the end of civilization.

The band Herbert assembled for the occasion is genuinely "big": Arto Lindsay appears on vocals for "Fiction", a still semi-unknown Jamie Lidell serves as an exceptional crooner on three of the ten tracks, friend Pete Wright (already present in a couple of cameos on Bodily Functions) co-writes the horn arrangements, while Shoniwa and the indispensable Dani Siciliano are confirmed as cabaret-vocalists on this dystopian postmodern Titanic.

The choice and use of samples is once again central to conveying the record's meaning: the pages of the book being leafed through in "Turning Pages" are those of Chomsky's "Rogue States"; the clicks of "The Three Ws" – with a deeply languid Siciliano – are the sounds of keyboard and printer while browsing the website of the School of Americas Watch (the organization that monitors abuses by the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation", and which has highlighted the ties between the federal government and Latin American dictatorships); the rhythmic thicket of "Misprints" is a collage of samples of newspapers on the situation in Iraq, popcorn and phone books dropped to the ground by individuals of various nationalities, while the nearly nine-minute sonata "Stationary" unfolds over beats lifted from the use of numerous books, including "Stupid White Men", "Rulers Of The World" and "War On Iraq". All of it set to the rhythm of smoky old jazz dances, ideally bridging the Roaring Twenties and unsettling, thoroughly contemporary omens.

Herbert once again manages brilliantly to move through an impressive stratification of meanings, closing out another record at a crucial crossroads between grey matter and listening pleasure. Within this dichotomy, this is probably his most complex and balanced work.

The obsessive sampling work of his recent productions, however, had not yet reached its peak of bulimic madness, a milestone it would only reach with the releases of the following two years.

It's not inappropriate to talk about bulimia when it comes to Plat Du Jour (2005), conceptually one of his most ambitious records ever.

The album is the result of almost two years of work involving field recordings, sampling, correspondence and research into the theme of post-industrial food (and, by extension, consumerism), accumulated through a set of several hundred samples placed entirely at the service of creative composition.

The trans-global production system has, in Herbert's view, confronted each of us with the grim choice between white flour and wholemeal flour, between refined products with zero nutritional value and potentially healthy products with quintupled pesticide residues. Those responsible have no faces or nationalities; they promote the holy global trinity of freezer-microwave-fryer, but within their dense web of newspeak and backhanders it's possible to glimpse the hidden factor behind it all: oil (the intricate cause-and-effect relationships are mapped out in an article by Norman Church, which Herbert himself references on the website created specifically for the project).

With the same rhythm and ruthlessness as a drilling and measurement operation, the thirteen tracks of the record unfold, each one targeting a different aspect and reworking it into an elaborate electro-concrete dish. A good portion of the episodes X-ray various mass-consumption foods manufactured according to the logic of industrial production: from the hormone-raised chicks and hens of "The Truncated Life Of A Modern Industrialized Chicken", for which Herbert captured the sound of a battery of 30,000 hens and 24,000 chicks (while the melodies are instead samples of Tesco eggs and the bass line is the processed cry of a chick born a minute earlier), to the reflection on access to and privatization of water in "These Branded Waters", built on a pseudo-ethnic melody played on a handful of mineral water brands owned by Nestlé. Rounding out a picture in which no detail is left to chance, the track runs at 182 bpm because 182,000 is the number of litres of water needed to produce one tonne of steel, while its length is fixed at five minutes and thirty seconds in memory of the percentage of access to healthcare services in Bangladesh (53%).

These few examples are enough to give only a superficial sense of just how dense a work like Plat Du Jour really is - a record that, despite the weight of its content, nonetheless manages to flow with a relative lightness of listening, thanks also to the usual lively, semi-parodic approach of its English delivery. The funky "Celebrity" is the supreme example of this: an analysis of sweetened, emulsified products of dubious origin (from those aimed at children to Pepsi Cola) endorsed by whichever superstar happens to be in vogue, themselves merchandise and emblems of the global supermarket's production model. A perspective translated into sound through the ecstatic lyrics of Siciliano ("Go David! Victoria!/ Go Beyoncé! Go Beyoncé!") and a compilation by boy band Blue used as a snare drum.

Plat Du Jour is thus a hybrid concept album, the first to fully realize Herbert's ambition of crafting an "other" kind of music, far removed from the idea of musical discourse as fiction (a definition which, in his view, applies to much of the history of classical music, and which popular music has, all things considered, echoed in different guises) and closer to multi-sensory documentary, while still retaining a creative and emotional dimension.

The most obvious criticism levelled at Plat Du Jour - namely its weakness when taken as a "standalone record" - should certainly be reconsidered in light of this broader vision, as well as the artist's own intentions. Plat Du Jour was released amid general chatter at the end of 2005 as a traditional album, with tracks available to download for free individually from the project's website, while Herbert decided to kick off the accompanying tour (during which, among other things, a chef was hired to recreate culinary smells live) with a rather symbolic environmentalist gesture: giving up air travel for good and relying solely on travel by land and sea.

Devised in parallel with Plat Du Jour, but radically different in its stylistic aims, Scale came out in spring 2006, announced by Herbert as "a 'pop' record... but in the onomatopoeic sense".

Scale can indeed quite comfortably be called the most pop work Herbert has delivered to date, his album of proper songs (an outcome likely aided by the valuable experience of the previous year's collaboration with his friend Roisin Murphy, "Ruby Blue"), as well as by far his most widely known record.

Scale is built on a staggering 720 samples, some of them among the boldest ever used (drums recorded in a cave, snares captured aboard a hot-air balloon, someone vomiting at an arms fair, a Royal Air Force Tornado taking off, the sound of a coffin being closed). This time, though, more than ever and just as one would expect from a record of "songs", it's the lyrical apparatus that carries the political discourse, all the more decisive given the increasingly central role played by Dani Siciliano's voice, who shares the spotlight here only with two sporadic appearances by Neil Thomas and Dave Okumu. A healthy dose of referential ambiguity is, as ever, preserved here too ("Don't you want to pollute your records forever with the name of Dick Cheney, uh?").

And yet, the eleven tracks on Scale flow pleasantly and solidly, almost sun-drenched, easy to hum along to, bouncing with the festive energy of dancefloor-ready vocal jazz, seducing with poses closer to funk and disco than to the house music forms of old. An impression certainly helped along by the more extensive use of instrumental arrangements, from the return of the brass big band of Goodbye Swingtime to a string ensemble recorded at the mecca of pop-rock production, Abbey Road. In other words, a finger-licking record of songs.

Yet however well Scale may work as refined entertainment in its own right, it remains hard to ignore its political implications on a slightly more attentive listen.

"Something Isn't Right" kicks off without much preamble, driven by a funky groove over a lush string backdrop: “Won’t you look me in the eyes?/ Start by admitting now/ Something isn’t right/ Something isn’t right in here”.

"The Movers And The Shakers" takes an even more explicit tone, bristling with references to Anglo-American imperialism, to the intervention in Iraq as the war breathing down everyone's neck (“I just don’t know how to bring about/ Your downfall, damn fool go figure out/ How those Christian bones can orchestrate/ Shock and awe”); "Down" and the almost dramatic "Just Once" take aim at the oil industry disguised as saccharine love songs, while "Birds Of A Feather", with its stirring closing crescendo, is an introspective existential-environmentalist statement.

The single "Moving Like A Train" is rightly the central summa of the record: Herbert disguises himself as Prince and takes the controls of a Panavia Tornado jet bound for ultimate destruction, while Siciliano, playing stewardess, warmly invites all passengers to fasten their seatbelts and enjoy the ride ("If you hate the destination/ Enjoy the journey 'cos you just can't get off").

As usual, Herbert's nihilistic pessimism constantly flips into its exact opposite – militancy – though with Scale he also opens up glimpses of more pensive, almost intimate territory, as shown by a subdued, off-key Herbert at the album's close, alone at the piano and even on vocals. In the final analysis, Scale is in fact a record of aleatory distances: the hidden physical-geographical distances between a commodity-product and its origin, the distances from the corporate decisions that govern our lives, relational and interpersonal distances, and finally the incalculable distance between life and a sense of death that has never felt so pervasive.

For this reason too, Scale probably stands as the English composer and producer's most inclusive, intense, and at the same time incredibly accessible work.

The culmination of his artistic partnership with Dani Siciliano, Scale also marks the end of the collaboration between the two, cleanly closing a long and fruitful chapter in Herbert's biography and discography. While Siciliano would go on to attempt a promising solo career (most notably the album "Likes…", which however found very little following), Herbert would vanish from the headlines, only to resurface four years later with some of the most controversial episodes of his output.

Silence is over

Between 2010 and 2011, Matthew Herbert delivers the "One" trilogy, three albums capturing the evolution of three "souls" at once alike and different: a night-club, a pig, and himself.

The first chapter is indeed One One, the musician's first – and to date only – vaguely singer-songwriter-style album.

Long a staunch opponent of star-driven showmanship in music, here Herbert tries for the first time to put himself at the center of the stage, not only as a composer but also as a shy, unprecedented vocalist.

Following the mold of his most recent work, the album blends concrete samples and organic instrumentation (even an acoustic guitar makes a rare appearance here and there) and unfolds with a muffled, welcoming softness, occasionally veering toward kraut territory (think of Notwist and the Kitty-yo roster), but more often hovering somewhere between Brian Eno's earliest ambient leanings ("Another Green World") and the elegance of a Donald Fagen.

The ten postcard-like tracks thus reveal an intimate Herbert, an unadorned chronicler of global everyday life, who flirts with glitch-pop aesthetics while putting it at the service of an already mature and independent digital songwriting.

An anomalous case yet anything but a step backward in Herbert's discography, as well as his one true nod to the pop-rock universe, One One is yet another score in an output already dense with eclectic twists.

Still on the theme of wild eclecticism, Herbert simultaneously throws down an ambitious challenge to his more traditional compositional side, within Deutsche Grammophon's "Recomposed" series.

Listening to the Englishman's take on Mahler's work, Recomposed – Mahler Symphony X, the first thing that strikes the ear is the touching respect with which he handles territory so far removed from his usual haunts. Despite the experience gained with the Matthew Herbert Big Band in blending wildly distant genres, this time his skills as an arranger – and above all his taste – are put to a hard test. Whereas with Ravel and Mussorgsky his work was deep and structural, reaching heights of angelic, diluted techno, here the tool of choice is the chisel. Indeed, Herbert's skill lies in the small interstices, in the subtle distortion of tones, in knowing how to lend a touch of modernity to melodies deeply rooted in a distant era.

There's no total overhaul or upheaval here; the secret in this case is hidden, intriguingly mysterious, almost imperceptible. The musician's insight lies in sharing his genius with the listener, who must catch the modern reworkings through close, careful listening. Another purely informative detail concerns the track division: although the recording is a single, indivisible piece, for CD release purposes the work had to be split into nine movements.

The calm of the opening passages is an abyss of tainted classicism, in which ghostly recompositions take shape only to vanish amid a triumph of powerful outbursts. However, as the minutes pass, the pace grows more mottled, pockets of silence and rumbling reverberations become frequent, and bursts of volume are handled with a gentlemanly touch. The seventh movement reaches the peak of this ascent with a blinding whirlwind of sound. The quiet, ethereal opening flows imperceptibly into a sudden cascade of techno rhythms and pulses so effective and impactful as to leave one stunned. A disturbing flow, like a tape gone mad in reverse, is repeatedly battered by a relentless rhythmic assault.

A masterpiece of transfiguration? What's certain is that few artists can afford the audacity of such an undertaking. The well-earned rest materializes in the seraphic unions of the last two scores, shadowy and dark decadent symphonies.

Between the end of an intense 2010 and the start of 2011, then, Herbert completes the two remaining instalments of the "One" trilogy, One Club and One Pig, two works that differ sharply in both form and content.

One Club is made up entirely of field recordings snatched inside a Frankfurt club, chopped up and reassembled in his trademark musique concrète pastiche as a new "mechanics of destruction": a highly meaningful choice for Herbert, who has long been irritated by the capitalist vampirism that swallowed up early-Nineties electronic scenes (their decay, precisely, into club culture), by the lost socio-political opportunities, and which here is presented in an alienated montage on a par with so many other elements of contemporary spectacle society. Like Wishmountain's Tesco products, like RadioBoy's Mc Donald's.

The third and most talked-about chapter of the trilogy, finally, One Pig depicts the life cycle of a farm animal in the age of mass industry. Herbert spends eight months on a farm, documenting and capturing the sounds of a pig's life from birth to consumption, narrating and bridging the disconnect of the reality of meat consumption within the capitalist production model and its implications for the animal's treatment and its eventual use as food (Herbert, contrary to what one might think, is not a vegetarian).

The result is music with a high "dramatic" quotient: the musician even has an instrument built so he can compose with the pig's blood drained in a restaurant kitchen, culminating in the pig being eaten by diners and an unexpected final guitar serenade to the pig that is no more.

The record, complex, layered and more than a little unsettling, will nonetheless infuriate PETA activists, who accuse Herbert in a statement of having exploited the tragedy of a "highly intelligent" animal for entertainment purposes. Herbert will fire back hard at the statement's own terms, branding PETA's stance as biased, superficial and artistically demeaning.

In 2012 Herbert therefore resurrects his avatar Wishmountain to return to a political reflection on one of his long-standing targets: the British supermarket multinational Tesco.

An energy drink, a famous instant coffee, two brands of sliced white bread, a fruit juice, a milk chocolate bar, Walkers crisps, toilet paper and, of course, the brand of brands, Coca Cola. The short list of best-selling products at Europe's most popular supermarket chain serves, on one hand, as a litmus test for the status quo of a good portion of society – Anglo-Saxon and beyond – and, on the other, as a macabre device for composing techno music aimed at that very same target audience.

Confirming his well-known aversion to drum machines, then, once again Herbert stitches together an album in which every single sound is drawn from objects and loops. Struck, crumpled, blown into, dropped, tortured and recorded in all sorts of ways, with his usual elaborate array of microphones in tow. Out of this come improbable plastic melodies ("Lucozade"), micro-house grooves ("Nescafe", "Kingsmill, Hovis & Warburton") and electro-like numbers with a nauseating aftertaste ("Walkers").

Get your legs and feet moving, and a moment later be horrified and unsettled. That, ultimately, is the effect Herbert has been after (and often achieved) for almost two decades now in whoever happens to listen to his concrete bacchanals. If the novelty factor may have faded somewhat, the stimuli and reflections that the Exeter whiz-kid can still trigger amid the grooves of his finely chopped concrete-techno remain fully intact, proving once again to be one of the sharpest interpreters of globalized tensions.

A few months later, Herbert once again gets people talking about him with another daring venture.

The composer receives a sound fragment from war photographer Sebastian Meyer, barely ten seconds in which frantic voices and whistles can be heard before a terrifying detonation that leaves behind nothing but a cloud of dust, captured from the explosions in Ras Lanuf, Libya, because "photography couldn't capture all the horror of what was happening".

The sample could not leave the English concrete artist indifferent, both because of his well-known, acute political sensitivity, and because of the ever-growing care with which he has been trying to weave his awakened consciousness into his recent work – from the "One" triptych to the more recent Tesco.

The mission, then, is to freeze history, hit "pause" and probe the components of the sound in order to better understand its frightening nature, and above all to bring back to the most visceral reality the virtuality of press releases and online news.

The short recording was thus put through a process of vivisection by the mini electronic orchestra Herbert assembled (with Yann Seznec, Tom Skinner and Sam Beste), which gave rise, amid the green English countryside, to a long improv session in which the processing of the sound fragment blended with the field recordings more or less accidentally pilfered from the location.

The three movements of The End Of Silence thus deliver a complex succession of variations on the theme, giving rise to extemporaneous noise symphonies and monstrous, swelling electroacoustic "melodies" – marked by the typical, childlike simplicity of Herbert's style, the same one found, when all is said and done, in the tech-house carpets of 100 Lbs – constantly interrupted by the war sample, repeated half a dozen times in different colours, right up to the (very long) closing minute of silence.

Everything set against a backdrop of seemingly sunny rural idyll (chirping birds, distant barking), its bucolic potential disturbed by an inevitable, macabre whiff of precariousness.

The End Of Silence is the most difficult and demanding work by the learned British producer, yet another substantial project in a twenty-year career of crystal-clear electro-concrete music, an atrocious reflection on the concept of war, abstracted by the media and turned into ideology by those in power, brought back here to its most immediate meaning: slaughter among the poor, entropy, or even, in Poundian terms, the great lie of the old.

After an intense decade spent mostly recording under his own name, the Englishman resurfaces once again as Herbert in 2015 and presents The Shakes as "an attempt to seduce the listener back onto the dancefloor". This obviously doesn't mean resting on the laurels of self-quotation. This time it's Matthew the father speaking: the album aims to be an intimate reflection on the widespread insecurity in which we all live, from macro-political issues to social tensions, while also offering itself as a space of human warmth and understated feeling.

Symbolically completing the picture of the work is the usual "concrete" component, this time produced solely from objects bought on eBay, including used bullets and artillery shell casings.

Despite these premises, however, The Shakes unfolds in tones that are markedly more introspective and subdued than its predecessor's flashes, drier in form and almost chamber-like in ambience. The record's "pop" strength undoubtedly lies in the voice of the excellent Ade Omotayo, who has previously worked alongside Amy Winehouse and Basement Jaxx, and who enriches a good half of the tracks with a vigorously soulful stamp — above all the opener "Battle" and the agitated "Strong", the latter built on a sample of London protests.

Rahel Debebe-Dessalegne's contributions are more middling: at her best she recalls the incomparable Dani Siciliano (sorely and noisily absent here), as in the soft, melancholy brass-driven flow of "Middle", while at her less inspired moments she sounds like a rather flabby Leslie Feist ("Warm" borders on the cloying). The brass-band duet on "Stop" is a complete success, and comes complete with a fine video about relationships and dependency.

All told, The Shakes gives its best in the first half, lingering in the second part over more complacent, self-satisfied solutions, like the pale and unjustifiably long-winded closing techno-pop of "Peak".

Honest and heartfelt, as well as, needless to say, masterfully produced and arranged, The Shakes nevertheless brings home a modest result, especially when compared with the string of masterpieces that preceded it. Still, in light of a clairvoyant and nearly impeccable multi-year career, it's a luxury Herbert can rightfully allow himself.

In 2021, Musca follows up on the formula of The Shakes, stretching the pace out even further and investing in a roster of collaborations with a more pronounced "dream-pop" flavour. The album closes off a sonic exploration built around sounds recorded during the pandemic lockdown and centred on his farm in the English countryside. The work highlights the maturity as a pop composer that Herbert has reached on the trajectory inaugurated with Scale, albeit with a few rough edges and a touch too much padding (the album runs over 75 minutes), plus a couple of performances that feel a bit too by-the-book.

The splendid "Hypnotised" and the inventive "Fantasy" are probably the best calling cards for getting a sense of what Herbert is aiming for at this stage of his artistic journey: masterfully crafted, rigorously concrete micro-house beds over which full, warm vocal contributions settle, along with the occasional, perfectly measured touch of orchestral elements.

Contributions by Alessandro Biancalana