Hmm, do I like what Matthew Herbert is doing on his new album One Club? You wouldn’t think that would be a tough question to answer having listened to it. As a big fan of people with vision – and even better, an actual manifesto as Herbert has – there’s so much to like.

Sampling other people’s music is strictly forbidden. That’s number three on the manifesto list. This is a man whose musical philosophy would see the end of hip hop and modern dance music if applied universally. That’s about as radical as it comes, although in fairness this is a contract he’s made with himself. There’s no need to make anyone else follow suit.

Having installed microphones all over the Robert Johnson nightclub in Frankfurt, he’s picked up in a single night excerpts of sounds that underpin the actual experience of the nightclub, those sounds that seep in when the music dulls or when you hit a dead spot of sound to get on the phone.

What’s a bit surprising is that the mixing of these sounds has been touted anywhere as Matthew Herbert’s ‘return’ to dance music. I say surprising because if you can imagine what a load of sounds recorded in a German nightclub that are not music would sound like, then there’s nothing very surprising here. Nor is there much variety. Some sounds come in on some tracks and not on others but there’s no sense of musical progression, no scope of styles, just lots of riffing on a scene.

What One Club does do quite accurately is represent and make me think of my own nightclub experiences. Jenny Neuroth seems to be the sounds heard from outside, or from the basement, or possibly from inside a coffin behind the bar. A driving, pulsing music plays on, somewhere, but not here, I think.

Markus Bujak comes very close to being actual, real dance music, possibly something you could even dance to; but in a very monotonous, pounding way with acerbic piano riffs kicking in, mixed with elemental fog-horns that make you less want to dance and more want to take cover. This is a tune that brings up that weird nervous energy you have when you’re probably on something and something trifling happens and suddenly it feels like the bottom is falling out of your world and you need someone to recite statistics to you just to get through it.

Indeed, where this album fails most, for me, is its ability to conjure up lots of evocative memories I have from nightclubs that truly I want to forget. Nicolas Ritter for example, which sounds like the sound system has shorted out, with horrendous girls sporadically screeching in your ear, the useless banter between DJ and crowd, the feeling the sound system is busted.

And honestly: toilet noises? Don’t I have enough of these already? Then again, the track Alex Duwe_ has something very genuinely infectious about it and, like the first number Robert Johnson, seems to hint that beneath all this there’s some sort of frantic sense, some sort of key that might make it all clear and unravel the whole.

What this album seems to do is very accurately capture the mundane, the monotonous and the emotional aspects of going to nightclubs. For a sufficiently advanced race of super-beings from the year 3050 One Club might well represent a stunning repository of early 21st century clubbing culture.

For me, it was like having the bad aspects of a night out crammed in to a little over an hour, but without the one really good thing about going to nightclubs – which is really good music, really loud. Without that, this fractious and often emotionally galling rollercoaster is a bit too much to stomach.

One Club is out on Accidental Records through Inertia.