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HerbertBodily Functions [!K7] Rating: 8.8 Even your pet rock recognizes how swiftly house music plummets into formula. Let's consider the choon of 2000, Hatiras' "Spaced Invader." Beginning with a Todd Terry-ish rhythm loop, the track discloses its two tropes pitifully soon after. Trope one: the EQ rush (the section of a woeful number of records wherein all sound is muffled, and then rushes back into hi-fi clarity). Trope two: Atari video game melody. Actually, to use the term "melody" would be pushing it a bit, in this case-- the synthline that masquerades as a melody is more similar to the beeps that "Super Breakout" makes if you bust down walls every 40 seconds. And while being an accomplished "Super Breakout" player does not earn you bonus points on college applications, it does give you more kudos in certain social groups than being a renowned master in, say, booger-rolling. Anyway, video game noises in house music records are universally boring. In opposition to such facile crowd-pleasing tactics, another school of house music has arisen, and may be termed "the Real House music movement." These producers and DJs are usually a reactionary bunch who prefer the good ol' daze when Marshall Jefferson still ruled Ten City and Larry Heard righteously slapped down Lucifer during the "Can You Feel It" sermon. Notable Real House music mavens, such as Francois Kervorkian and Joe Claussell, have made commendable efforts to introduce Fela Kuti's Afrobeat and Cesaria Evora's Cape Verdean fados into their Body and Soul sessions. Regrettably, a facile bandwagoning wing of this school is content to wear out the grooves of EBTG vs. Soul Vision's officially released bootleg "Tracy in my Room," Negrocan's "Cada Vez" and St. Germain's "Rose Rouge." Real House music also manifests boring tendencies. UK house and techno bod Matthew Herbert is here to save us. His house music inclines to the Real school, but commendably avoids all the hempy acid-jazz baggage and Madame Jo Jo's deep funk obscurantisms. Instead, Herbert's house is built on fractures, the shingling of cracks, clicks, and mistakes, and his partner's gorgeously melancholic torch song voice. For the foundation of Bodily Functions, Herbert has taken the title of his Tresor mix disc, Let's All Make Mistakes, quite to heart. In fact, he's developed a ten-point manifesto outlining his Personal Contract for the Composition of Music (PCCOM) that succinctly incorporates his Manifesto of Mistakes. Important PCCOM doctrinal points are as follows:
Only sounds that are generated at the start of the compositional process or taken from the artist's own previously unused archive are available for sampling. The use of, ordering and manipulation of noise-sound/found-sound is to be held as the highest priority in composition. (tenet 2)In restricting the sampling of other music, tenet 3 compels Herbert to originality; tenet 4 prioritizes the sonic aura that acoustic instruments lose when crudely digitized; and tenet 5 acknowledges that unintended sounds may be essential emergent properties of the creative process. In tenet 5, Herbert doesn't go as far as William Burroughs did in explaining that his cut-ups and novels were the pressures of a demon external to him. So we know that while Herbert may be a wee bit Benedictine in his rules, he's not a paranoid conspiracy junkie nut. And on the clear evidence of Bodily Functions, these rules have gamely assisted Herbert and his collaborators to realize an undeniably beautiful artwork. "The Last Beat" moves away from the random scattering of glitches into a Savannah, mint-julep-sipping afternoon slow waltz with Dani Siciliano posing unanswered questions ("Are you dreaming me?/ Is this feeling you?") to an unheard, unseen dancing partner. The graciously restrained piano chords and Barry Guy-like acoustic bass remain aloof, allowing Siciliano's vocals to be the focus of our attention. Yet, her questions are posed to us, and we're unable to grant her a single reply. Enhancing the song, Herbert's close miking of Siciliano's voice permits us to approach a contact point with her breath-- one of her/our bodily functions. The duet "You Saw It All" is contrastingly definite ("And though I may never see/ All that you did/ Promise me nothing more/ You saw it all") as Luca Santucci in a mixture of plaintive and resolute tones remonstrates with Siciliano, whose one rejoinder is "you saw it all." This, of course, makes his gaze the authoritative version, and extinguishes her own view of the relationship. "Suddenly" begins as a house version of a Boomerang-era Creatures marimba ballad, but closes with a primed-for-Twilo tribal stomp dusted with clicks and an occasional soft piano chord every bit as sonorous and insistent as a Sunday morning church bell. There's nothing smooth about the languid, yearning instrumental "About This Time Each Day," in which Siciliano relates a haiku-brief story with her clarinet, as Phil Parnell's piano overrides her narrative. "I Know" drives like a Dave Holland Quartet piece, as uncovered in one of Jan Jelinek's loop-finding-jazz-records. Beginning with another barely audible element (this mechanical churning noise is, in fact, the sound of a mouse attempting escape from a garbage can in Herbert's studio-- how about that for adhering to PCCOM tenet 5? ), "Addiction" peaks with Siciliano's lachrymose delivery of "Just as I think it's done/ You're there/ Darkening the sun." Herbert, once again the apogee of restraint, maintains the vocals' prominence by assuring that the Rhodes piano, the bass, and the percussion (this time an organized array of smashing glass bottle sounds) are more like suspicions than presences. "Leave Me Now" entwines two Siciliano vocals, mimicking the conflict internal to this duet: "Still don't know me/ (Tell me what you need)/ Each roll over/ It's so over/ Can't console me." Herbert sets these words amid a sparse click track tenderly augmented with a nearly inaudible synth pad and an occasional piano chord. This song, like the others (don't call them "tracks") is jazz, set in a house framework. Only Ludovic Navarre's St. Germain project has successfully negotiated the perils of this type of jazz, but without the immense benefit of a vocalist-- let alone a vocalist as affecting as Dani Siciliano. How far Siciliano has climbed from the cutesy Roisin Murphy-isms of Herbert's last offering, Around the House. Herbert's incorporating of found sounds could easily have led him into novelty. To more transcendent effect than Matmos' use of surgical sounds on A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, Herbert's found sounds are without referential baggage. Had I not learnt about the pail-breaking mouse on "Addiction," my best guess for the source would have been a turning tumble-dryer. In this reference-free manner of sound appropriation, Herbert mimics in sound what he's achieved in his lyrics. While Herbert's website espouses an overtly political message to them, the lyrics are ambiguous and indefinite. They are the all-but-blank canvas upon which each listener will form his or her own conclusion. Whether you conclude that "Leave Me Now" is about global warming or your pestering mother-in-law is utterly your call to make. This ambiguity is going to infuriate the literal minded, but by the inclusion of this blurriness, Herbert has distinguished himself from house music producers whose vocalists trill trite slogans of self-actualization. Bodily Functions so effectively destroys every house music cliché, from which ever school, that my Romantic self wishes just to call this album "high art." Bodily Functions is far and away the only jazz-informed house music album you'll ever need. I don't think what Herbert and his collaborators have achieved can soon be bested. We can only say huge prayers that other producers will be inspired to deliver this cripplingly banalized genre from its pestilent self, and slap down Lucifer once again.
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