From 2003, this was the first full-length outing for UK producer/musician/composer/DJ Matthew Herbert’s big band ensemble, which featured four trumpets, four saxes and four trombones along with piano, bass and drums. The album was mostly created from the recording of a single live performance, and features big blocks of solid ensemble brass playing and sweeping multi-part horn riffs that recall 30s/40s big band swing, but that have then been resampled, re-edited and rehoused in contemporary productions. It’s an album that’s embedded with politics — politically charged literature is rustled, dropped, sampled and incorporated into the songs, Herbert’s PC printer is recorded printing from a politics website — although as is often the case with Herbert’s work, you’d be forgiven for not picking up on this as you’re transported by gloriously rich, smoothly gliding horn lines, or by some new studio cut/paste/re-edit trickery. There’s a broad range of styles here: Simple Mind is a smokey, late night torch song, Fiction a fast-paced stop-start/jerky swing-funk track that descends into expertly syncopated sample cut up beats, The Three W’s uses a melancholy ensemble horn line and some wonderful sample trickery to create a languid, emotive, filmic, cinematic song that doesn’t know what time period it’s from, producing a delightful musical chronological confusion. A clever and beautiful album.