Looking for some political content and ’30s-jazz horns with your innovative listener-oriented house music? Well, has Matthew Herbert got the album for you! Longstanding house godhead (and rock press fav) Herbert is gearing up to release There's Me and There's You. The record is out October 28 on Berlin's Studio !K7 records, perhaps best known for distributing the DJ-Kicks compilation series. Following on the jazz-throwback motif of his 2001 LP Goodbye Swingtime, the album will incorporate big-band instrumentation that will require an 18-person orchestra for its subsequent tour (for which a small handful of dates have been scheduled), as well as political lyrics excoriating the 21st century's pattern of abuses of power.
The real key ingredient to Herbert's sound — dubiously touted as "sophisticated subversion" by the official press release — is his use of bizarre, grandly conceived samples. Sounds incorporated into There's Me and There's You's aural fabric will include, among many, many others: (1) The sound of protesters in Palestine being shot against the West Bank wall dividing Israeli and Palestinian territories; (2) vocal sounds taped inside a London McDonalds; (3) the sound, not only of several dozen condoms being dragged along the floor of the British Museum, but also an orchestrated ruckus in the British Museum's entrance hall which includes the sound of several people spraying Britney Spears' perfume brand Curious; and (4) the machine used to keep Herbert's own premature son alive after his birth. Well, erm, I guess the British Museum's floors produce a remarkably unique timbre, and Britney Spears demanded the use of highly four-to-the-floor conducive spray bottles circa Curious' 2004 launch. Either that, or Herbert just has a penchant for gratuitous conceptual spectacle.
There's Me and There's You tracklist: