- Camden's Roundhouse was full of the sound of snoring. But this wasn't an audience put to sleep by a particularly dry concert; it was the live premiere of Matthew Herbert's latest conceptual project, A Nude (The Perfect Body). The show is based on Herbert's most recent album of the same name, which was created using the sounds produced by a naked person in a room over a 24-hour period—from grooming and eating, to pissing. The aim was to reinforce the universality of the human body: though we live in a world that only seems to highlight our differences, in many ways we are all the same.
In the past, Herbert's conceptual work has struggled from prioritising the ideas over the music. Albums like One Pig, which used field recordings of a pig as its source material, and The End Of Silence, which was made using samples from a ten-second recording of Libyan bombs, are more interesting to think about than they are to listen to. Last Thursday's performance sidestepped this pitfall by presenting itself as sound art rather than a concert. The crowd weren't necessarily expecting to be entertained.
This was due to the current setup in Roundhouse's main space. The audience were concentrated in the centre of Ron Arad's Curtain Call, an immersive art project whereby images are projected onto 5,600 silicone cords that hang in a broad circle. Though the crowd couldn't see Herbert, or even tell to what extent the sounds they were hearing were prerecorded, there was always lots to look at. Each of the album's eight songs, which are titled "is sleeping," "is hurting" and so on, was accompanied by grainy video footage of nude dancers gracefully performing exaggerated versions of the corresponding bodily function. The images were projected 360 degrees around the circle, engulfing the viewer.
The music, though, was a mixed bag. Often the sounds were so far removed from the body it was hard to know what I was hearing. They felt dislocated and awkwardly layered, lacking movement or structure. The performance needed the visuals to remain interesting, and even then it occasionally dragged. The best moments were when recognisable sounds became elements in an ambient or experimental techno track—the piston-like breath that forms the rhythmic backbone of "is awake," the brutal crunch of an apple on "is eating," the sinister snip of scissors on "is grooming." During "is hurting," the harsh blasts of noise followed by reverberating whimpers accurately imitated the internal experience of pain.
At one point, I realised that the dancers on screen were actually present beyond the curtain; watching their jerky articulations of the music helped to ground the sound in its source. "is shitting," for example, is a disgusting listen on headphones, but its live performance was great—plops and farts turned into a pummelling techno odyssey, brought to life by the dancers running around the outside of the curtain, brushing the cords so the image swayed in bewitching synchrony. If only the rest of the performance hadn't felt so academic.
Photo credit /
Stuart Leech / Radio Times