Music for Insomniacs

Don't expect to get a good night's sleep after listening to this daft and disturbing offering from the ex-Mighty Boosh actor.

Not content with only being a brilliant comedic actor known for his work on U.K. television series such as The IT Crowd, Matt Berry branched out into music with two wonderfully odd albums of psychedelic folk-funk for Acid Jazz.

On screen, Matt Berry is all about that voice: a sonorous, knee-trembling baritone that garlands every utterance in comic grandiloquence. Across his parallel music career, however, Berry has tended to keep his vocal input comparatively subdued, with works like 2013’s Kill the Wolf refraining from the puffed-up operatics with which he’s readily associated.

The fifth album by The IT Crowd's Matt Berry recalls a drowsy Jean Michel Jarre, writes <strong>Phil Mongredien</strong>

Declaring that your new album can help conquer insomnia seems, initially, self-defeating. If it induces such a calmness that potential listeners drift off to sleep, then there’s the potential it may never be heard in full. Yet this is what lies behind Matt Berry’s fifth album. It was written and recorded at his home studio in the small hours while he was suffering from insomnia. He wanted to create a music which would still his mind so set to devising his own therapeutic soundtrack. Music for Insomniacs is the result.