Herbert: ‘Secondhand Sounds’
April 8th, 2002 by freddie96
HERBERT
Secondhand Sounds
(Peacefrog)
Some people are just born with music in their blood. Certainly Matthew Herbert was. The son of a BBC sound engineer, he initially started playing music when he was only 4 years old, joined his first orchestra at 7, played his first gigs as a keyboard player at 13, and experienced his first overseas tour at 16.
He hasn’t exactly slowed down since then, having released an extraordinary stream of records over the last few years under his various monikers – Herbert, Dr Rockit, Wishmountain, Radio Boy – and innumerable remixes for other people. (These are listed on his website if you want to see exactly how many. Let’s just say he either works very quickly or doesn’t sleep much.) Not to mention a whole host of TV and film soundtrack work. Being a Herbert junkie must surely be a full-time job.
For the somewhat lazier kind of music fan, this double album collects together some 21 of his remixes, almost all of them distinguished by his detailed, dubby approach to dance music (what he calls ’my wobbly music’). As he recently admitted, ‘I’m tired of a perfect universe where DJs feed the latest records into a computer and perfectly beat match them. I’m human, I’m flawed and was never supposed to be a DJ’. This attitude translates into a refreshingly relaxed approach to remixing: Herbert works more with listeners in mind than dancers – though of course in the right environment these can go together hand in glove.
According to all reports, Herbert’s performance at the Big Chill at Lulworth Castle was one such occasion. As these things go, I was over at the Sanctuary Stage at the time and thus for weeks afterwards had to endure others raving about him in terms which made me wholly jealous. Having bought this album, I have belatedly been able to understand what all the fuss was about. It’s high class electronica made to last.
A more detailed description of ‘Secondhand Sounds’ is, I’m afraid, entirely beyond me. All I can really say is that I like working to it, I like hearing it before going out of an evening; its combination of clicks, beats and deep basslines invariably makes me feel good. I bought it hoping it might sound like the gorgeous deep dubby house that Bruce Bickerton DJs, and it does. It works perfectly well at low volume, and becomes thoroughly entrancing further up the dial.
Highlights include a version of Motorbass’ ‘Ezio’‚ and another of his own called ‘Banquet’. Inevitably, given that this is a double album, some of the tracks seem a little weak in comparison – and not everyone will want to hear Moloko’s ‘Sing it back’ again, even in this ‘tasteful dub’ version – but there’s no avoiding the conclusion that at 26, Matthew Herbert is already an extraordinary and highly committed talent. FB
[galleryurl=http://www.bigchill.net/gallery.html?id=18]Photos from last summer (inc. Herbert)[/galleryurl]
