MATTHEW HERBERT - Musca

After a career start in the more frontier-oriented reaches of house, marked by an unprecedented and philosophically refined elevation of error as a compositional method, in 1998 Matthew Herbert inaugurated, with "Around The House", a fruitful run of concept albums poised between musique concrète and club music. Built around the polysemy of the word "house", the record was constructed from the sounds of washing machines, microwaves, small plastic objects, cutlery and leaking sinks, but also from techno-house echoes of various stripes and velvety lounge-room vocals. Without quite meaning to, Herbert had produced what today we would probably welcome as a gripping and creative sonic account of the experience of pandemic lockdown. Fast-forward to the actual pandemic context of 2021, and the English producer decides to deliver, with "Musca", his own take on isolation and the broader dynamics tied to the globalization of climate and viral upheaval. "Musca" is thus built on a vast assortment of samples recorded during the pandemic's first waves at his farm in the English countryside – musca refers precisely to the family of insects he meticulously observed and tracked on his estate during that period.

Contrary to what his most recent, hyper-politicized releases had accustomed us to, thematically "Musca" has a strongly introspective dimension and moves within a happy ambiguity of references, poised between private existentialism and a gaze on the collective. A balance that, on closer inspection, he first struck with the pacifism of "Scale" and later explored with "The Shakes", the only other release under the Herbert name between that episode fifteen years ago and today. The trajectory running from the excellent "Scale" to "Musca" is not just one of analytical content, but also of purely stylistic traits. That album, in fact, opened a chapter in Herbert's biography in which the house concretism of his early days blurred into an exciting avant-pop fusion, bolstered by his taste for orchestral, chamber and jazz-leaning work that he had been pursuing in parallel, under various guises.

"Musca" evidently picks up the thread of chamber electronic pop, with an even more essential and bare-bones production and a decidedly brooding, stretched-out runtime (it brushes up against 76 minutes), yet organically rich in compositional ideas, this time in the most traditional sense of the term. 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.

And yet, across its generous running time, "Musca" also reveals the limits of this new dimension of Herbert's work as a pop composer. The first is his choice of vocalists, an area in which the producer has spoiled us rather too well in the past, with apt, never-banal features, whether the performances of Luca Santucci, Neil Thomas, Shingai Shoniwa or the memorable collaborations with the ever-sublime Dani Siciliano. "Musca" instead offers interpretations that often feel too by-the-book, if not outright flat, especially in the cameos from American singer-songwriter Allie Armstrong. Sían Roseanna delivers the features that come closest to the familiar Herbertian mood, adding a welcome note of sinuousness in the album's final stretch. Another limitation of the album lies precisely in its length, not always justified by any real density of content or by thematic development, which makes several moments of excess indulgence and over-the-top virtuosity all too apparent, particularly in its middle section.

In any case, "Musca" takes stock of the far-from-obvious juncture sir Herbert has reached on the threshold of his fifties. It's a work that confirms all the depth, breadth and far-above-average quality that have always characterized the producer, who for once expands rather than invents. Artistic maturity, broadly understood, is also this.

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17/11/2021