The only body parts usually involved in house music are the twirling fingers of the producer, tweaking samples with a twist of knob or dial, or the swaying, sweaty bodies grooving to the finished product on the dance floor.

Matthew Herbert kicking house butt

This makes "Bodily Functions," the new album from British DJ and electronica artist Matthew Herbert, as much a conceptual statement as an album title. Instead of the usual synthesized, four-to-the-floor rhythms associated with house, Herbert has based much of the album on the noisy, idiosyncratic cacophony of the human body and other found, rather than created, sounds.

"I think house as a genre is in need of a good kick up the butt," said Herbert during a recent stop in Tokyo.

And bum slaps might just be included in the compendium of sounds he contorts into club music. Under the loosest possible definition of house, Herbert renders door slams and baby babbles into rhythm tracks. Instead of drum machines, Herbert uses the smack of skin on skin, the gnashing of teeth and other body-derived noises submitted from all over the world to his Web site. The rustles of a mouse loose in the studio, the sort of mistake usually headed for the dustbin, becomes valuable source material.

Singer Dani Siciliano provides more than just a voice.

Herbert calls this "wobbly" music, music that, as he says, "sounds like the technology isn't quite working."

"I'm more interested when things go wrong," he notes.

Other artists have been inspired by mistakes, most notably Marcus Popp's Oval project, whose music was initially based on sampled and edited together skips in CDs. But these often require a certain patience on the part of the listener, a determination akin to exercising when you'd rather be crashing on the couch with a bag of chips.

"Bodily Functions" might start with an eccentric premise, but Herbert shapes his mistakes, his odd sounds, into tracks that resemble nothing so much as songs. And not just any songs, but classics.

"I harken back to the Golden Age of songwriting," he says. "The '20s, '30s and '40s and the songs of Cole Porter and Gershwin."

In this, too, Herbert has relied on a human touch. In particular, vocalist Dani Siciliano smolders with a smooth, classy delivery akin to Lena Horne or June Christy.

Many of the songs were created according to Herbert's "Personal Contract for the Composition of Music," his guiding manifesto. Aside from forbidding the sampling of other people's music, it holds that traditional acoustic instruments should be used when physically possible. Thus, "Bodily Functions" soars with horn and string arrangements and subtle, classic piano riffs from Herbert's piano teacher, Phil Parnell, all played rather than sampled.

"Music is always a reaction to other forms of music," says Herbert. "I used to make very linear records with everything in the right place. But I'm not interested in that anymore, because you hear it everywhere. Maybe in a few years, I'll be making white noise records because everyone else will be making jazz."

Getting beyond the easy, smooth surface of "Bodily Functions" to tease apart its signifiers requires the kind of careful listening habits that years of rote alternative rock or club music have eroded. Just as "Ulysses" isn't just another day in some Irish guy's life, "Bodily Functions" isn't just another jazzy house album. As the very detailed liner notes that accompany "Bodily Functions" attest, Herbert is deeply interested in "the life of the sound."

"Every sound carries with it all sorts of interesting and irrelevant information," he says. "I'm interested in reclaiming functional sounds like door slams or [the movement of] furniture and giving them a life and making them sing. I'm also interested in capturing special moments or events through sound."

As a case in point, the voice of Siciliano isn't the only part of her that Herbert puts to use. On several cuts, her digestive track also plays a prominent role.

Jacques Derrida in his book "Noise: The Political Economy of Music" posited that changes in the control of sound foreshadowed social change. Thus the drift of musical performances from churches to stately performance halls presaged the rise of the bourgeoise and the shrill hiss of the amplifier, fascism.

It is tempting to read into Herbert's merging of technology, aesthetics and human biology some hint of a cyborg future. But that would require standing still long enough to collect one's thoughts -- for "Bodily Functions" is also "body" music in that it is still, as the ecstatic crowds at Herbert's recent gig at the Liquid Room demonstrated, dance music.

"At the end of the day," says Herbert, "music should either leave you amazed or miserable."