Herb Sundays 80: Philip Sherburne
The music critic and journalist shares tributaries that "helped point him down the road toward ambient music."
Herb Sundays 80: Philip Sherburne (Apple, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon). Art by Michael Cina.
“Can't believe we live in the same epoch as this guy.” - me in an email to someone in the early ‘10s about Philip Sherburne
Philip Sherburne is a music critic and journalist based on the Balearic island of Menorca. Born & raised in Portland, then spending time in Providence, San Francisco, Barcelona, and Berlin, Sherburne has written for The Wire, XLR8R, and Resident Advisor amongst many others, and has been a contributing editor for SPIN, and now Pitchfork, where he has published over 500 reviews to date.
While Sherburne's brand is most closely attached to Electronic music, it doesn’t define his interests. This playlist shows it's merely an arrival from decades of mainlining early 4AD globalism, broken goth emo-folk, and small batch New Age proto-ambient. Why Sherburne has been ideal as a voice for Electronic is that it has been where much of the innovation has been in his journalistic arc. It's the space where Indie Rock/Radiohead went to don a new colorful coat, where Hip-Hop went to fully flip from sample-based (though it feels like it's turning back), and it remains the genre atlas that still feels emergent. In short, it’s a great space for a writer’s beat.
Music criticism has been a topic of note in recent years, namely the decreasing space in major outlets for it, but also the anti-intellectualism afoot which dovetails with the rigid demands of stan/fan armies. With musicians biting back at journos for even positive reviews, there’s a sense that the critic’s pen is wobbling, what with Ed Sheeran saying stuff to Rolling Stone like “Why do you need to read a review? Listen to it. It’s freely available!…make up your own mind.” Not sure how Young Ed discovered music as a youth, but without people digging deep and sharing their (dis-)tastes, the musical landscape would be a lot less vital. A good critic is not just a contrarian, but a weathervane of how to accurately consume the popular and a footlight towards the future, and into history.
With decreasing column space, music journalism often pivots towards celebrity but Sherburne has held the line, focusing on the subtextual and intangible elements, or as Reilly Brennan (Herb 66) and I call it, feel. Like previous Herbalists Simon Reynolds (Herb 32) and Hua Hsu (Herb 13) (Pulitzer!!), Sherburne is into the implicit elements of music as much as the explicit, chasing the feeling, the swirling vapor it creates, and the hypnotic pull of sound.
That said, PS can do the elongated, let's follow the artist type-piece too. He’s a deft hand to send in when you want to get the inner workings of madcap artists like Aphex Twin or DJ Koze who he profiled for Pitchfork in 2018:
At dinner, Koze tells me a story about Hamburg’s famous Golden Pudel club where he once jumped from an outdoor staircase onto the club’s roof and fell straight through to the dancefloor, covered in dust, like Wile E. Coyote. I can believe it; particularly in the early years, Koze’s music had an antic, defiant spirit. But these days, he channels that energy into Brazilian jujitsu. He talks about his training almost rapturously.”
On the mat, he says, “You are nothing. Nobody knows your music. You fight and you survive or get killed. There’s no feedback. There’s no love. There’s no money. In fact, it costs money. It’s injury and sweat and pain and blood. But it’s all for insight.”
The Herb mix contents may surprise some but it makes total sense to me. For instance, I knew he was a Smog/Bill Callahan head (“Not exactly an outsider but definitely not an insider, he occupied a liminal space—making out-of-the-way sounds in out-of-the-way places, forever trailing rock music’s dominant strains the way a decommissioned highway shadows a six-lane interstate.”), and I also knew there was a goth college radio heart under his globetrotting Balearic chill which informs some of my favorite passages of the mix.
I was trying to recall when I met Philip and clocked Ghostly's first road-dog van tour I booked in 2002. The San Francisco stop was hosted at a small bar in the Mission called Amnesia. The Bay Area at the time was the du jour experimental electronic scene of the moment, pairing the emotional distance of the laptop with a punk attitude, often mixed with a charismatic vocal/karaoke performance and a dusting of politics. The regular night that hosted our concert was called Trouble, which was a collective that included Kid606, Kit Clayton, Sue C., Sutekh, Blectum From Blechdom, Twerk, and others. My friend Matt Laszuk and Philip were our hosts and perhaps the great Vivian Host (Herb 35) was involved or at least just in attendance which validated the whole thing. It’s hard to say.
It's been a pleasure to watch Philip evolve over the years from a friendly but journalistic distance. I like that he hasn't afraid to mix in with his subjects, often DJing or producing amongst them. I even liked his Gonzo Era, where his writing took you inside the scene as a reporter/partygoer ("On a stage facing the pool, a skinny young man with a blond mane [Vladislav Delay] swigs champagne from the bottle while he nudges absently at a computer mouse; his own massive eyeshield tosses off disco glints…”). In more recent years Sherburne has continued to mine his craft, as a presenter on Lapsus Radio from 2018-2022 and now co-running the Balmat record label with his Lapsus co-host Albert Salinas which with only a few releases in from artists like Patricia Wolf and µ-Ziq, threatens to become one of the best "feel-based" labels out there.
But most important to history is the raw musical discovery Sherburne’s work offers us. In a recent review of Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti, an artist who I would argue may not get coverage on a major US site without Sherburne’s co-sign, he gets going and stays cooking.
Then, without warning, her voice erupts into dazzling multi-part harmony, as though all the inchoate longing of her previous albums had been concentrated into a single swollen deluge. Austere yet never wanting, Se Ve Desde Aquí is an album that empties you and fills you up. There’s a desolation at its core, an intimate knowledge of lack, but also a fervent belief in redemption—even if it lasts no longer than a momentary explosion of color, like parched earth blooming after a long-awaited rain.
I will turn the mic over to Philip as our guide, but definitely check his new Substack, Futurism Restated, which continues his constant surge of musical recommendations from the emotive regions of discovery.
“As I started setting aside songs for my (S)Herb Sundays playlist, a running theme quickly became apparent. Most of the songs I was pulling were from my high school (1985-1989) or college (1989-1993) years, and most of them also had some generally atmospheric sensibility—even if just a particularly gauzy synthesizer part—that, in retrospect, helped point me down the road toward ambient music. Once I realized as much, I consciously focused my selections on just that formative period and general vibe, while excluding the actual electronic music I started getting into around 1994, just because that would have been opening up a whole ’nother can of worms. With very few exceptions, everything included here is something I listened to in high school, college, or within a few years afterward (up to 1995 or 1996, more or less). The exceptions:
Flash and the Pan, “Walking in the Rain”: a 1978 single I discovered at a Berlin flea market in the late ’00s.
Joe Hisaishi, “In the Sea of Corruption”: I was not cool enough to know about anime as a kid; my daughter is a huge fan of Miyazaki’s 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and we’ve had the soundtrack in heavy rotation recently. This song is ambient af!
Paul Bley, “Synth Thesis”: I was definitely not cool enough to know about Paul Bley as a kid. I stumbled upon this 1994 ECM album of synth-and-piano improvisations a few years ago and it blew my mind. It definitely fits in with the piano thread that runs through portions of this playlist, and once I had put it into my work-in-progress playlist, I couldn’t bear to take it out.
As for the rest, a smattering of recollections: I discovered Thomas Dolby’s The Flat Earth at the public library when I was 12, and it remains one of my favorite albums of all time. I took jazz piano from a woman who happened to be the mother of Patrick O’Hearn, an erstwhile member of Missing Persons who went on to become a new-age synthesist on Private Music (Peter Baumann of Tangerine Dream’s label!—not that I knew anything about that at the time). My high-school girlfriend (whose uncle was in Dead Moon!) gave me 17 Pygmies’ Jedda by the Sea, and I didn’t really get it then; only in putting together this playlist did I realize the resemblance to Swans’ “In My Garden.” Ditto Tones on Tail’s “Rain” and the Glove’s “A Blues in Drag”—they’re the same chords! I went through a phase in college (felt like a year, was probably like two weeks) when I gave up my steady diet of Fugazi and Rollins Band and could listen to nothing but contemporary classical and ECM New Series; that’s where Arvo Pärt came from. I stumbled upon Irena and Vojtech Havlovi’s Little Blue Nothing in a cafe in Prague in 1994 and it felt like a secret for many years until it was recently reissued. I include two Dif Juz songs just because, fuck, Dif Juz! Not enough people know about them. And I include a Dif Juz song featuring Elizabeth Fraser next to an actual Cocteau Twins song because, fuck, Elizabeth Fraser! The older I get, the more certain I am that Cocteau Twins are my favorite band of all time. And Victorialand, possibly more than any other album, planted in my mind the idea that music could be synonymous with atmosphere.” - PS
From the field: Sherburne takeover edition - “Songs I cut, but remain playlisted in spirit”
Shriekback, “Coelocanth”: I was 14 when I discovered Shriekback’s Oil and Gold. This conch-shell fantasia is probably the first purely ambient thing I ever heard? Not available on domestic streamers, which is unconscionable.
Funeral Oration, “Shadowland”: a Dutch punk band I stumbled upon in the racks at Portland’s 2nd Avenue Records, where I did all my buying in high school (and bought my prized copy of Poison Idea’s Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes, on red vinyl at that). Didn’t really fit the theme of the playlist in the end. But my emo leanings were definitely born here.
David Sylvian, “Pop Song”: a 1989 single I didn’t discover until about a decade ago. In the end, it just felt a little bit too divisive or jarring to the flow. But man, what a fucking song. Everybody should know it.
Hugo Largo, “Grow Wild”: from a singular 1987 album—just bass guitars, violin, and voice— by a New York band fronted by Mimi Goese and produced by Michael Stipe. Music for a melting world. Blew my 16-year-old mind, still blowing it 36 years later. Can still be had for cheap on Discogs—what are you waiting for?
 | A guest post by
|