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Plat Du Jour is Matthew Herbert’s most political and experimental album yet, but thankfully, he hasn’t discarded his love for quirky, whimsical musicality. Its subject, as you might infer from the title, is food, more specifically factory food, with some tangents on celebrity culture, the death penalty, the Atkins fad, the Iraq war and globalization. Since this is experimental house music and not folk music, these themes aren’t articulated in lyrics, but come out of the sources of the sounds used to make the music. For example, These Branded Waters is made entirely from recordings of various water bottles being blown on and drummed on with chopsticks, while the liner notes flesh out details about corporate water, Third World sanitation and the amount of water needed to make one tonne of steel. Trust us, it’s a lot less tedious than it sounds.
