Sometimes, the right music can totally make your night. Then there are times where the right night can make any music sound better. In the case of Matthew Herbert‘s innovative new album, One Club, the night and the music intersect seamlessly, and it’s intentionally impossible to tell where one stops and the other begins. The concept is a clever one, especially for a veteran, erstwhile club DJ like Herbert, as he installed microphones throughout the legendary Robert Johnson nightclub in Frankfurt, mixing the results from him spinning there one evening into an entirely different sonic experiment altogether.

Making music out of people listening/enjoying/dancing to music is akin to Warhol the ad-man turning those same advertisements into art, reflecting society back onto itself with a mirror of his own making. Pretty heady stuff, concept-wise, but musically it plays much more loose and fascinating, as snippets as peculiar as the crowd talking, chanting, taking a cab ride, and going to the loo are threaded smoothly in to the music, in a sense becoming the music, as everything from the night is fair game, and the fine line between the experience and the sound starts to fade entirely.

Like any enjoyable night out at the club, there are some exhilarating highs and some tedious lows throughout One Club, but the end result ultimately proves to be a good time, all without having to deal with the innumerable drawbacks of a dancefloor packed with drunk revelers. The initial desire when presented with a concept album such as this (the second in a planned three-part series, with One One featuring nothing but sounds created by Herbert, and the forthcoming One Pig apparently consisting only of manipulated noises made by a pig), is to try and break the songs down to their elements, and try and figure out which sounds are coming from where. But it becomes a much more enjoyable listen by resisting that temptation and instead absorbing the record as a whole, letting the inherent energy and vibe of the music transport you to Frankfurt or whatever club you frequent.

The music is playfully futuristic throughout, bouncing from pristine, unblemished beats to sounds that seem to be filtered through long hallways and closed doors, presenting the listener with an experience closely aligned to walking around the actual club itself. One Club is quite a jubilant experience, no matter how inaccessible some of the songs are, with the robotic rhythms and propulsive tempos continually pulling you into the center of the teeming masses that you can’t help but picture dancing to these tracks.

And while using your imagination helps to fully process the imaginative concept behind this work, that is perhaps where the album fails the listener a bit, with the simple fact being that nearly all of us weren’t present at the club on this electrical evening. That ebullient experience can’t be conveyed through sound alone, no matter how many microphones are placed throughout the club. So One Club ultimately works better in theory than execution, with Herbert bringing the listener as close as they can get to the actual nightclub experience without actually going out for the night. But nothing can truly match the thrilling feeling of actually sweating it out on the dancefloor while the immense, overwhelming beats take over everyone around you. This record, as with any live music recording no matter how enthralling, can essentially only take you halfway there, and ends up being an unconventional, innovative document of an event where you truly had to be there in order to fully know the score.