Matthew Herbert teases upcoming album with new track ‘Hypnotised’
Musca is out October 22
Matthew Herbert has released a third single from his forthcoming Musca album, due out on October 22 via his own Accidental Records label.
‘Hypnotised’. – which follows ‘Fantasy’, featuring Verushka, and ‘The Way’, featuring Y’akoto – this time utilises the vocal skills of Mel Uye-Parker.
Musca, meanwhile, is described as a “domestic” house album, namely house music made mostly of found sounds heard in domestic environments, such as kitchens, living rooms and garages. ‘Musca’ is the next in the series of domestic house albums to follow his LPs ‘Around The House’ (1998), and ‘Bodily Functions’ (2001), both of which were recently reissued on vinyl as part of the label’s ‘21st anniversary of the Accidental label’ series.
On top of the new LP, Accidental has announced a package of 12” remixes containing two of Herbert’s best-known house remixes – his Tasteful Dub of Moloko’s ‘Sing It Back’ from 1998, and his High Dub of Louie Austen’s ‘Hoping’ from 2002 – both of which are due for release on 12th November.
The remix bundle is preceded by the theatrical release of ‘A Symphony of Noise’ – a documentary that follows the last 20 years of Matthew’s work and process.
Contrasting to Herbert’s last big band album ‘The State Between Us’ – made with more than 1000 musicians and singers across Europe – this album is described as more “inward looking”. It features only eight singers: Verushka, Siân Roseanna, Allie Armstrong, Bianca Rose, Mel Uye-Parker, Daisy Godfrey, Y’akoto and Joy Morgan – all of whom Herbert has never worked with before, nor met face to face.
It also features musicians Nick Ramm, Tom Herbert, Tom Skinner, Finn Peters, Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian and Leo Taylor. Like the singers, they all self-recorded and in isolation from each other.
Matthew said of the album: “Like presumably many other albums made during the last year, Musca reflects on navigating the challenges and joys of our most intimate relationships whilst the world is in turmoil. Not just with Covid, but with the rise in state and political violence, facebook-friendly fascism, white supremacy and a climate in crisis.”
Herbert has talked about the need to retreat to an earlier, more familiar way of creating music as a form of solace during an unstable year. His PhD, completed last year, was about the ethics of composing with sound. Additionally, Musca precedes an as yet unnamed, upcoming experimental project based on more than one billion sounds.
The album takes its name from musca, which is the genus part of the Latin name for a housefly, and includes a variety of sounds from around the farm where he lives, including a synth made from his wife’s dog, one of his pigs snoring and fox cubs gekkering.
Matthew continues, “The week last year when I wrote most of these songs seems like another era altogether. I have no idea how they will sound a year later now the context has changed so markedly. The optimist in me wants to leap forwards, vaccinated into the sunshine brandishing the NHS logo, but the realist in me is aghast at the wave of death unleashed upon this country by an incompetent and corrupt government. The record probably has ended up with both of those things however – optimism that an alternative way of organising ourselves is possible and anger and gloom that we’re not there yet.”
The album was mastered by long term collaborator and Grammy winning engineer, Mandy Parnell (Björk, Brian Eno and Aphex Twin). Pre-order your copy here
And finally, a documentary film about Herbert’s music making and ethos is also set to be released soon – ‘A Symphony of Noise is out now in German cinemas and will be making its UK premiere soon.