Every now and then I'll stumble upon a musician's work online and be floored by their originality, and last night my stumbling led me to Herbert's new album, Scale (!K7). Creating a cacophony of unique sound is what Matthew Herbert does, and on this album he used 723 objects to do so. In describing the record, Herbert said the following:"This record was designed to be more of a celebration. 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... Hopefully the album still has that celebratory quality, even though it's a kind of sad. 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."
I posted recently about Laurie Anderson, and Herbert's unfaltering originality echoes that of Anderson's. When you make a track out of answering machine messages (which Herbert does on the album), you have to be sure of what you're doing, and Herbert's jazzy avant-garde stylings are as sure-footed as experimental music can get.
Download:
Herbert | The Final Meal of Stacy Lawton [MP3]
