Bleep

It’s no secret that Matthew Herbert set a new standard for house music — in fact, much of the time, he was able to turn the genre into something else entirely. Though it’s easy to pick out countless examples of his boundless invention, 2001’s Bodily Functions has the air of an opus, an LP so effortlessly captivating and brilliantly strange that you’d forget it was made by a person — which is ironic, given that the majority of its fleshy textures are quite literally ‘human’.

An ardent conceptual artist as well as producer, the corpus of Bodily Functions is largely built from — appropriate to its title — the scrapes and squelches of the human anatomy. Across the album’s runtime, it’s possible to make out an instrument rack of smacking lips, rustling human hair, and the sound of toothbrushes against teeth, manipulated and transformed into delivery systems of complex and densely layered house rhythms. The ASMR quality of these tracks are woven into a classy lounge jazz atmosphere, largely owed to Dani Siciliano’s sultry, horn-accompanied vocal performance, met with the chaotic-neutral genius experimentalism of likeminded sound-scientists Matmos.

As boundlessly playful as it is implacably audacious, Matthew Herbert’s Bodily Functions turns the term ‘electronic body music’ completely on its head.