On his newest album, Heard Noises, Matt Berry takes a musical leap of religion and brings in a extra reflective – and, at instances, confessional –method to lyrics. The actor-musician tells Prog in regards to the mind-shift he skilled after coming into his fifth decade, and the present he acquired from considered one of his musical heroes that performed a job within the album package deal.
Reaching 50 final Could was extra than simply an age factor for Matt Berry. His half-centrury milestone coincided with the tip of his profitable run in TV comedy-horror What We Do In The Shadows. He’d been a central a part of the sequence, enjoying pansexual vampire Laszlo Cravensworth, for greater than 5 years.
“I turned 50 on the final day I filmed,” he tells Prog. “In order that was a major day for me. I hadn’t executed it consciously, however every part I’d been writing from the 12 months earlier than was all geared round that. After I look again, it’s all pointing in that course. I feel sure issues occur to you that drive you to progress.”
This unconscious reassessment of life and work fed into what ultimately turned Berry’s new album, Heard Noises. As did the recurring goals. “This obsession with nostalgia was creeping into my unconscious.
“I used to be having a repeated dream of mainly seeing my youthful self within the distance and understanding whether or not I ought to run as much as him or simply let him get on with what he was doing. It felt so actual: I may see him and all my pals, precisely how we had been about 10 years in the past. And it saved occurring, so I couldn’t ignore that.”
One new track specifically looks like a direct results of that have. To Reside For What As soon as Was finds Berry wrestling with notions of previous and current: of residing within the right here and now versus some idealised reminiscence palace. ‘It doesn’t matter what I do I’m trapped,’ he sings, ‘Like a person in a jail of his personal.’
Different items, corresponding to Keep On The Floor, function a type of self-support machine, its protagonist negotiating a path by worry and bullshit till he can merely ‘ignore the sound.’ And so it goes. Heard Noises tends to be extra confessional than something we would have beforehand heard from Berry.
Opener Why On Fireplace? incorporates the traces: ‘There’s an opportunity for me to run and to be free/However I’m scared to maneuver my arms and transfer my toes.’ Right here he’s, idling on the crossroads of center age, conflicted by the chances of the place to show subsequent. “That’s precisely what that track is,” he confirms. “It’s me pondering, ‘Now I’m free to do different issues, however how a lot of a leap do I take? And if I do one thing that’s radically completely different, may it fuck up every part I’ve executed earlier than?’
“Then on the identical time – being sober about it versus being valuable – it’s like, ‘However who offers a fuck? Nobody actually cares.’ I’m by no means valuable about myself for greater than 10 seconds.”
If Heard Noises represents a fuller, extra complicated lyrical portrait of Berry, then the identical applies to the music. For somebody who typically imposes sure constraints on his work – 2018’s Tv Themes revisited signature tunes from his youth; 2023’s Simplicity was an instrumental collaboration with library music label KPM; Nashville-era Dylan knowledgeable 2020’s stripped-down Phantom Birds – this newest effort is a free-roaming affair.
The album’s heat grooves pivot between basic Californian acid-pop and 60s R&B, judiciously textured with acoustic people, area rock and prog-leaning electronica. It may all broadly be described as fashionable psychedelia; a extra expansive companion to 2021’s Blue Elephant.
I received my mum’s choir to sing particular person notes going up a scale, which I may then map onto the sampler
“I believed I may need shaken off the psychedelia factor by now, however I simply can’t,” says Berry. “It’s like experimental instrumentals – I can’t shake that off both. That’s what I’m form of based mostly on. That’s partly due to how a lot of a press release of freedom psychedelia was throughout the 60s. You may do completely something with any type of sound. The entire level was to make it sound like one thing you’d by no means heard earlier than.”
Heard Noises can also be very particular at instances. The wonderful Silver Rings, for instance, was impressed by the collision of musical generations throughout the 60s, when veteran session gamers can be referred to as upon to again the hippest younger artists. “I’ve all the time liked that concept,” Berry explains.
“The band they put collectively for Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound Of Silence had been a bunch of blokes of their late 40s who’d been enjoying because the Forties and 50s. So, you’ve received their kinds, however by a contemporary act. And that brings its personal character. That’s what received me off, attempting to recreate that form of backing band.”
He isn’t fully alone in these endeavours; the album options numerous collaborators, together with common drummer Craig Blundell (Frost*), Fruit Bats’ multi-instrumentalist Eric D Johnson and American actress Natasha Lyonne, whose spoken-word activate I Entered As I Got here mirrors the track’s spooked-folk atmosphere. Elsewhere, Kitty Liv of Kitty, Daisy & Lewis seems on the fabulously punchy duet I Gotta Restrict. Then there’s Berry’s mum, billed with the ‘S Membership 60s Choir.’
Jean-Michel Jarre understood how a lot of a fan I used to be. Per week after I got here dwelling, a field arrived with a observe
“At Christmas final 12 months, Mum and her choir mates had been doing a carol live performance,” he says. “I went alongside and located it actually attention-grabbing. As a result of they’re all amateurs, they weren’t all in tune with one another. In consequence, you bought a barely unearthly choral sound. A number of months later, within the village corridor, I received all of them to sing particular person notes going up a scale, which I may then map onto the sampler, which matches onto the keyboard. When you make a chord or cluster of that, you get one thing nearly Ligeti-like.”
This ingenuity has turn into one thing of a trademark. However the employed assist, Heard Noises was largely recorded alone, Berry presiding over banks of classic weaponry in his dwelling studio: guitars, bass, Mellotron, pianos, Moogs, Vox and Farfisa organs.
Exploring the potential of analogue gear has been a lifelong obsession, ever since his mother and father gave him a transistor organ as a child. “Each observe is barely out, in the identical means that my mum’s choir is,” he says. “So it’s going to poke out of the combination, as a result of it’s not excellent. It’s extra human.”
The sleeve artwork gathers collectively a number of things that map his journey so far: scale-model synths, character toys, eight-track cartridges, Laszlo Cravensworth’s plastic fangs, and an results pedal that when belonged to Jean-Michel Jarre. The latter’s Oxygène, alongside Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, had been formative influences on Berry’s DIY aesthetic – solo albums constructed from the bottom upwards.
I don’t purchase comedy albums; I don’t have any comedy DVDs or comedy motion pictures… Different artwork types type of linger extra
“I went to Jean-Michel Jarre’s studio in Paris to do a podcast and we talked about Oxygène at size. He was explaining how he received the sounds from the organ by the guitar results and onto tape, and he understood in a short time how a lot of a fan I used to be. Per week after I got here dwelling, a field arrived with a observe: ‘I may see how a lot this was thrilling you, Matt. Please take pleasure in.’ It was one of many precise pedals he’d used on Oxygène, which simply blew my thoughts.”
Provided that Heard Noises acknowledges all areas of Berry’s multifaceted profession – author, actor, comic, painter, musician – how does he desire to classify himself? “If I needed to put a label on it, it might simply be as an artist,” he displays. “However I really feel like a wanker saying that!”
But nothing fairly satisfies his creative urge, it appears, like music. So is it honest to say it’s his major inventive outlet? “Nicely, I don’t get excited by comedy in the identical means,” he admits. “I don’t purchase comedy albums; I don’t have any comedy DVDs or comedy motion pictures. For me it’s all about doing issues within the second. As quickly as I’ve completed I’ve misplaced curiosity.
“Different artwork types type of linger extra. Music is the one I dream about, the one which I get excited by. It’s like being a child once more.”