Krftd, Arbiter of Style and Ideas

This is the second album from Herbert’s Big Band outfit, and while the handle implies an aesthetic shift from electronic music to avant-jazz, the effect isn’t as pronounced as it reads on paper– Herbert’s always mined from both genres regardless of his moniker. As with Plat du Jour and 2006′s terrific Scale, it’s also a protest album: his original concept was to record it entirely out of sounds sampled inside Britain’s House of Parliament, a request which the government eventually denied. His frustration at that denial has manifested in songs with stronger, more overtly global and political themes than before; each beep in the aforementioned “One Life” represents 100 deaths resulting from the Iraq War; “The Story” features the rustling and crinkling of select British broadsheets and glossy celeb-obsessed tabloids; “The Yessness” features snippets from 100 figures of power saying the y-word, and, perhaps most notably, “Knowing” is a social experiment that finds 100 volunteers from around the world (of which, full disclosure, this writer is one, even if I can’t figure out which “you” is mine) each contributing one word to the song’s snaking melody.