Four Tet - As joyful as your life

“It’s electronic, but it wouldn’t seem like it”. That’s how Four Tet, aka Kieran Hebden, described his music a few years ago. Today those words sound almost disorienting: the idea that electronic music can sound gentle and express everyday emotions now feels like the most normal thing in the world. It wasn’t that way in the mid-Nineties, and the story of this “normalization” cannot be separated from the name of this Anglo-Indo-South African.

When the computer plays free jazz

Born in London in 1977, Kieran Hebden grew up on his father’s records and the drum’n’bass blasting through the school common room. In high school he devoted himself to post-rock alongside his friends Adem Ilhan and Sam Jeffers – still together today as Fridge. The real turning point, though, came with university: forced to rehearse with the band only during holidays, he had to find other outlets for his unstoppable musical passion. The first was to dive headlong into free-jazz listening; the second was to develop, in his own way, an insight borrowed from American lo-fi: to make exciting music, your own bedroom is more than enough.

Out of this initial euphoria came his first solo works, released under various names: 4T Recordings, Joshua Falken and, finally, Four Tet. The stylistic range proved broad right from the start, despite the simplicity of the tools involved: a PC, a few freeware programs and various folders of samples, jazz and otherwise, picked up here and there. The tracks ranged from techno to post-rock, but clearly showed a preference for the "scorching" sound of psychedelic jazz and hip-hop beats. The press spoke of intelligent dance music, as with Aphex Twin, Autechre, Plug, but the distance from the cold, cerebral sound of those artists is evident: “Everyone seemed to be looking at fusion; I wanted instead to capture the dark, devilish soul of the jazz I love. And its spiritual dimension. I’m a European kid from an average family: the rhythms of black music aren’t part of me, but thanks to the computer I was able to borrow them from records”.

So the releases from the late Nineties – above all Thirtysixtwentyfive and Dialogue – are a tribute to the murkiest side of jazz, a passionate taking apart and putting back together of rhythms and atmospheres that makes real a sound otherwise out of reach for an English university student.

A Folktronica History

But Kieran Hebden doesn't like standing still. As the new millennium began, there was too much going on around him to stay anchored to his dark-jazz revisitation. In particular, it was the r'n'b productions of Timbaland and Rodney Jerkins that shook him loose. "There was this Whitney Houston track, 'It's Not Right But It's Okay', all arranged with kalimba. And then that other one by Brandy & Monica, 'The Boy Is Mine', with the harp up front. I realized I could be a lot more ambitious sound-wise. Once you've got a computer and thousands of samples at your disposal, nothing forces you to stick to the usual instruments used in the usual way."

Alongside that came a passion for Celtic folk. Not so much for the songs and traditions, but for the textures and warmth of that music. Next to the free-jazz vinyl, records by Pentangle, Fairport Convention and Fotheringay began piling up, and the hard drive filled up with new samples too. "What I felt was missing from those records was a stronger rhythmic element. Something like a fusion of kraut-rock and British folk." Unable to find it, he decided to make it himself, on his computer.

Pause, Rounds and the records of that era were born with this spirit in mind. But they ended up representing much more: critics went wild over that meeting of electronic patterns and acoustic sounds, coined the term folktronica, and started applying it left and right. Books, Prefuse 73, Múm; then Tunng, Colleen and many others: all these names were lumped together, their music traced back to a shared sensibility — a "new gospel" of warm timbres, cozy and slightly rustic atmospheres, electronica with an innocent, melancholy air. Essentially, the indie spirit laying claim, in one fell swoop, to both folk and the idm legacy.

Whether or not the label was well-founded, something was indeed happening. For the first time there was a sizeable crowd of bands and listeners who saw the computer as the most fitting tool for expressing everyday emotions — no longer just a magic box for extracting alien, abstract, exasperatingly convoluted sounds.

Kieran Hebden, however, wasn't thrilled with this pigeonholing: "It only captures a small part of my music," he claimed. And he was right. For one thing, in his tracks the computer wasn't an instrument to be paired with guitars and tambourines, but a means to go beyond them: a way to play the unplayable, no longer just for himself but for anyone — manipulated sounds, reversed passages, bold rhythms and counterpoints that lock together with a precision and naturalness no musician could ever achieve.

The emotions he created, moreover, went well beyond the intimate, convivial mood of his folktronica peers. Drawing on the sensibility and methods of classical minimalism, from Reich to Riley, by way of Nyman, Four Tet lit up, for the first time, the "spiritual" dimension he'd been reaching for with his early dark-jazz. A magic made of small things, simple instants that, seen with sincere eyes, reveal a brighter world.

From the Bedroom to the Dancefloor

Irritated by the press's pigeonholing, and above all buoyed by the rough, grainy sound of his live shows, Four Tet arrived at the midpoint of the 2000s eager to shake things up. Just as folktronica was becoming a calling card to flaunt on Myspace, he swerved toward a chaotic, noisy, heavily percussive sound. The two Everything Ecstatic releases (album and EP) collided the scorching jazz of Dialogue with the festive minimalism of his folktronica period, adding new variables to complicate matters further — chief among them electronic glitches (glitch, as it was now called) and rhythmic contortions that seemed to be seeking reconciliation with drum'n'bass. The most significant aspect of this phase, though, is the search — for now only an ideal one — for an escape route from the "bedroom sound": from the start, the tracks seemed designed more for reworking and the high volumes of live shows than for placid playback on a home hi-fi.

In recent years, the exploration of the live dimension has indeed grown ever more intense. As ever, Four Tet has toured half the world bringing the material from his records on stage — carefully avoiding any faithful recreation of their original atmosphere. "A gig lets me tune into my emotions and the audience's. It's an unrepeatable moment where I can give listeners a snapshot of my musical state of mind. I can't waste it trying to recreate the album!" From this point of view, his spirit is akin to that of jazz: the tracks are starting points, raw material to be reforged each time through improvisation, according to the feelings of the moment. It's precisely this elective affinity with the jazz world that brought him close to legendary drummer Steve Reid, with whom, starting in 2006, he made four albums and played countless shows.

The other major development on the live front was his discovery of DJing. Putting on records to get people dancing might sound trivial, but until a few years earlier Four Tet had never tried his hand at it. In 2007 he started with a few nights at The End in London, and it was a revelation: "I felt the thrill of something new again. I felt scared again." This new experience pushed him toward minimal techno and the Chicago house of its golden age — and toward the whole Dubstep/2-step ferment taking London by storm. "Dance is the most adventurous world there is right now. It's enormously more dynamic than rock: now that it's gone back underground a bit, the people you see in clubs are really there for the music!"

His passion for dance culture gave Four Tet what he'd long been looking for: the main road out of the "bedroom." In 2009 he was resident DJ at Plastic People, the temple of Dubstep. He collaborated with Burial — a schoolmate of his from college — releasing the UK's best-selling 12" of the year. And now he's in the thick of a new creative phase, in which his longstanding passions combine with the bare-bones beats of dance music. Today more than ever, Four Tet is chasing those elusive emotions that amount to ecstasy and the sublime, and he sees their fulfilment in the euphoria of the dancefloor. "I love the bliss that's created when you really lock into the music. It's illuminating — it makes you realize just how much you can truly love life, and every instant of it."

Heart and DIY

Over his now twelve years of activity, Four Tet has moved through many styles; all of them, though, born of the same spirit, a serene blend of curiosity and Do-It-Yourself ethos. Even today, his music is born from a PC containing the bare minimum: outdated software and a cheap little microphone that came bundled with his first sound card. No Mac, no Ableton, no ProTools or the like: Four Tet knows that limitations spur creativity, and he's aware that the extreme freedom offered by today's trendiest tools hides a steering toward preordained patterns and sounds. "With a lot of the electronic music coming out today, you can picture exactly how it looks on this or that program's interface. Producers get so absorbed in the visual side that they start thinking of music in those terms, playing along with the game on offer without ever questioning it. But if you play guitar, you're not obliged to play it the way your music teacher taught you, and that's a genuinely interesting thing. One of the reasons I make electronic music is that the ideas I have in my head can't be realized on a guitar, but they can on a computer. Creating something unique with a computer is a lot easier, as long as you don't let the convenience of the software become a brake on creativity."

Kieran Hebden is remarkably clear-eyed about his own music, and it's obvious how much of himself he puts into it, in terms of life and emotion. The essentially instrumental nature of his compositions has never stopped listeners from identifying with it: "People often ask me, 'Why is there this sound? Whose voice is that?' In those moments, I realize just how much people read into me and my music." His records are a diary; the tracks lead back to experiences and memories — the heartbeat of a child not yet born, a friend's daughter playing a toy piano, his sister Leila complaining because Kieran keeps opening the window blinds. This ability to "fill the music with life" comes through especially in the many remixes he's been commissioned to do over the years: "I can't work on a track I've been handed until I make it mine. It has to connect to my life — only then can I start thinking, 'I'll keep this, I'll cut that.'"

Despite a career spanning more than a decade, Four Tet is still a musician brimming with ideas and vitality. What keeps his music feeling like a breath of fresh air is his tireless curiosity. Asked: "Is there anything you wish you'd known earlier?", Kieran Hebden replies: "No, if anything I wish there were never an end to the things left to discover. The moment of discovery creates a kind of innocence that I love, and once it's gone you can never get it back. But right now so many new things are happening! I'm desperate to be on the front line, exploring all of them."

As long as that spirit holds, the future looks bright.

Listening Guide

Four Tet's discography amounts to more than thirty releases, remixes excluded. The average quality is remarkably high, and even the "minor" chapters often hide pleasant surprises. A few brief notes should help readers decide where to start and how to dig deeper afterwards. The list leaves out releases entirely absorbed into later albums, and does not include the work of Fridge, nor the four albums credited to Kieran Hebden + Steve Reid, which would deserve a chapter of their own.

Albums, EPs

Thirtysixtwentyfive, 1998: a single thirty-six-minute track, already leaning toward dark-jazz atmospheres, but without the "fire" of the later Dialogue. It's a long downtempo flow in which, more than Hebden's own hand, what stands out are his influences: the Tortoise of "Millions Now Living Will Never Die" in its sparser sections, and Photek's drum'n'bass abstraction in the rhythmic construction.

Dialogue, 1999: his first long-player arrives right at the threshold of the new millennium. The young Kieran is finally aware that he wants to fully test himself against his own compositional sensibility. Dialogue marks the start of a path that would mature over time, in which free-jazz and fusion rhythms tend to dissolve into folkloric shades, occasionally disrupted by a muted, troubled beat ("The Butterfly Effect"). If we could fully decode the spirit of this London musician, we'd be swept up in a flow of lights, colours, celestial visions. What we're faced with is a kaleidoscope of laptop tinkering. At times even a kind of lounge-music-in-the-club surfaces, as in the opening track, "The Space Of Two Weeks", with its jazzy ups and downs, filtered through ethnic inserts fished out of old traditional Indian vinyl records. In "Chiron" and "Alambradas" looped sitars shoot out, digitally shattered by a Saracen groove and an Afro-tinged jumble. In Hebden's imagination, percussion always plays a central role, and the glitchy mass layered on top sometimes disorients, sometimes follows the various changes in direction. These are mostly electronic sketches that reveal the young English composer's poise, openly introducing his dominant traits. "Dialogue" is the first small-but-great step toward establishing a model that stands apart from the electronic fads and trends in vogue in the early 2000s. It's a digitised patchwork that announces, in grand style, the arrival of a master.

Pause, 2000: a further step toward the definitive perfecting of the blend. This time the potpourri is flavoured with calmer rhythms, in a luminous snapshot of glitch colouring. Everything flows according to a meditative attitude. The die is cast in favour of peace of the senses. There's no shortage of accelerations, pulled off with class on "Untangle" and on the killer single "No More Mosquitoes". The former is ecstatic chill-out music set vibrating over a four-to-the-floor kick. In the latter, Hebden ventures into a cybernetic groove, a stinging sonic metaphor for the havoc wreaked by millions of tiger mosquitoes across Southeast Asia. It's an album in which Hebden sparingly unleashes his combinatorial art, rich in field recordings used like music-box chimes, caressing tok-toks that precede jubilant trumpets ("Twenty Three"), tremors sampled from household appliances melted into Chinese boxes that open in unison ("Harmony One"), children's voices placed far in the distance, opening onto acoustic fascinations steeped in nostalgia ("Parks"). It's as if Hebden were picturing his own Eden and trying to shape a hypothetical soundtrack for it. In Pause, calm and inner harmony reign over a musician of a noble spirit. In that sense, the acoustic softness of "Leila Came Around And We Watched A Video" and the radiant phrasing of "Everything Is Alright" are the two moments where that balance reaches its fullest epic quality. It's the prelude to the imminent masterpiece.

No More Mosquitoes, 2000: besides the title track, later also included on "Pause", this EP contains three tracks with a clearly folk-leaning bent. "Warmer Places" and "Flon" are the most interesting: the former is a successful attempt at building a meditative "slow number" over r'n'b rhythmic patterns; the latter leans hard into the glitch element, targeting some British folk sample that comes out thoroughly chopped up without losing any of its brightness, while gaining in dynamism.

Paws, 2000: an EP reworking material from the contemporaneous Pause. The only track credited to Four Tet is "Glue Of The Otherworld", which mangles the original "Glue Of The World", turning it into an abstract funk number in an Akufen vein (!). On the other three tracks, Koushik, Manitoba (later Caribou) and Boom Bip take on remix duties. Koushik's work is stunning, turning "Hilarious Movie Of The 90s" into a radiant neo-sixties crescendo complete with vocals.

Rounds, 2003: the masterpiece of folktronic-era Four Tet, which embodies and at the same time transcends all the hallmarks of his style from that period. The compositions are more balanced than ever, free of smudges and avant- sloppiness. Just a few samples per track, chosen with heart and recombined according to his own rules into a kaleidoscope of rhythms and sounds. The folk/acoustic component is fully blended with jazz and hip-hop elements: the resulting spirit is something entirely its own, not traceable back to this or that single inspiration.

A couple of anecdotes and curiosities about the album (for everything else, see our milestone feature): the heartbeat that opens the first track isn't human, but canine. It comes from a 1970s LP made for veterinarians. The word "rounds" in English refers to round songs (like our own "Fra Martino campanaro"): Hebden chose it as the title thinking of the cyclical nature of his music, all built on repetition and phase shifts. The track "Unspoken" originally contained a different piano melody, sampled from Tori Amos's "Winter". Left off the final edition for copyright reasons, it still appears on the promotional version of the album distributed to the press at the time.

Everything Ecstatic, 2005: the only one among his major releases that could be seen as a "detour" in Four Tet's career. Hebden had not yet settled on the path to follow, and above all wanted to shake off the folktronica label. It remains a successful album nonetheless, even if less sharply focused than the others.

From the very first track, the return of that murky sound that had branded Dialogue is unmistakable: instead of jazz, though, here there's noise, pure and simple, with a roaring bassline and a constant rain of glitches. Four Tet focuses heavily on rhythms, not only working them with his usual precision and varying them within the tracks, but even overhauling their very framework. Instead of balanced acoustic sounds, this time he opts for a stark opposition between dry electronic clicks and the most thunderous percussion samples. Even the patterns grow heavier than his usual deconstructionist hip-hop: many have a walking-pace cadence, but the aim always seems to be to rush the listener, pushing them into sensory overload.

Hebden bares his claws, but the tracks still radiate the same serenity as ever, here perhaps even made livelier and more festive. Emblematic, for that matter, are pieces like "A Joy", "Smile Around The Face", and the album's own title.

Everything Ecstatic Part 2, 2005: an EP that reworks two tracks from Everything Ecstatic in an even noisier key. The result is decidedly muddled, even if the more minimalist section of "Sun Drums And Soil (Part 2)" is heavenly (it sounds like Terry Riley!). Three other tracks round out the record: the only one worth mentioning is "This Is Six Minutes", with its bare-bones melody and constant rhythmic about-faces, which spill into thoroughly atypical patterns that are, for the first time, absolutely danceable.

Ringer, 2008: with this EP, Hebden catches pretty much everyone off guard. It's an unexpected flight toward cosmic attractions that had never fully surfaced before. Four movements in which he plays the mouthpiece for that tendency - then underway among the most promising European producers based in Berlin - of digging an endless arsenal of synthesised sounds out of old couriers' suitcases and rerouting them into a more steadily cadenced strain of techno. Ringer would prove to be just a brief parenthesis, one that confirms Kieran Hebden's productive versatility, here closer than ever to some of the younger names on today's electronic firmament (above all, it's worth mentioning Nathan Fake, the captivating young talent on the Border Community label).

There Is Love in You, 2010: rather than marking Hebden's definitive conversion to the dancefloor creed, the album signals a reconciliation, already under way, between the club-oriented Four Tet and the bedroom-studio one. The tracks have clean structures, road-tested on dancefloors, but the versions chosen for the record have a warmth and a calm that make them perfect for home listening. So you can let yourself be swept away by the crystalline arpeggios of "Circling", watching its repetition and slow mutation unfold; or absent-mindedly follow the pure, candid voices of "Sing". Tracks like "This Unfolds" and "She Just Likes to Fight" are placid, even drowsy, despite the four-to-the-floor kick and the obvious techno lineage - or Dubstep, in the case of "Plastic People". Yet at no point do you get any sense of disconnection, any feeling that these tracks really belong somewhere else - whether in some otherworldly realm or, more prosaically, on the dancefloor.

But to make them explode on the dancefloor, one imagines, all it would take is turning the kick drum up a little.

Pink, 2012: a digital-only release gathering a handful of singles put out between 2011 and 2012. These are among the most dancefloor-ready tracks Hebden has ever released, and their inspiration seems to stem from an implicit question: "how far can you 'strip down' the Four Tet style while keeping its warmth and recognisability intact?". The answer seems to be: "quite far". The tracks are built on schematic rhythms and melodic lines, grafted onto loops that layer and overlap one after another, gradually filling the bare tech-house skeletons with light. Six little gems of ecstatic repetition emerge, perhaps not individually memorable but undeniably effective in terms of rhythmic drive, and a fine showcase of the artist's more live-oriented side.

Morning/Evening, 2015: a record that lends itself to a double reading. On one hand, we could be looking at a partial rebirth. In that sense, the emblem is the bittersweet limbo of "Evening Side", the less obvious and less immediately appealing of the two odysseys: a dispassionate immersion in analogue grain, crossed by vocal harmonies and melodic flows in minor scales. Few colours, a sound palette as bare as it gets, a seabed-like landscape complete with sirens drifting all around. A bit like taking "Angel Echoes" and stretching it out toward nothingness, stripping it of everything that Four Tet had ever been. If you have to start again from zero, after a long and illusory binge, a zero is exactly what's needed, and this could well be it. Could, precisely. Because then there's the other half, namely "Morning Side". The one that welcomes you, wins you over and seduces you. The key word is the same one defining much of the new frontier in current electronic ferment: exoticism. We travel to India, to a market in Delhi, among fakirs and carpet sellers, a voice rises up, warm, riding a house-music carpet and a few flourishes.

A record that gathers the quintessence of the reasons behind his artistic decline, the very same reasons that fuelled the rise of his persona and his popularity. But it's also a hypothesis, as self-referential as it is honest, for a way out of that tunnel, for a possible change of course. How it will end is anyone's guess; for now, what's left is to enjoy a contradictory, inconclusive summer cocktail that is nonetheless incredibly seductive, pleasant and substantial.

Sixteen Oceans, 2020: after the dry, minimal compendium of New Energy, 2017's effort caught halfway between first steps and half-hearted synthetic fascinations, as if wanting to remain permanently suspended between a comfortable past and a timidly unsettling future, all while never giving up its signature exoticism, Hebden returns in 2020 with a work romantically titled Sixteen Oceans. A deeply sweet indulgence of his, spread across as many as 16 tracks that lay out the well-tested recipe of essential beats and catchy spiritualism, floating like waves breaking at night on the beach at Rodrigues, a remote island in the waters of the Indian Ocean. Still, glorious past notwithstanding, this comfort zone begins here and there to reveal some shadowy patches, reached perhaps via paths walked all too many times with eyes closed. Moments of fatigue that are, in the end, forgivable, but which do weigh on the overall balance.

Well, in this long-awaited return Hebden really has no intention of shedding his skin, or daring to stage the kind of change that, for some, is damn well necessary in order to stay relevant. Past forty, the London musician who grew up on his dad's vinyl and the drum'n'bass piped through the school common room pursues only what the emotional tide suggests to him, metaphorised by the oceanic calling made explicit from the outset. The opening, however, is certainly not among the best. "School" lines up a "garage" kick over a lounge base that's too overused and hasty to perk up the ears. While the following "Baby" tries to do better, drawing on a vaguely Dubstep odd time signature, alternated moreover with "house" vocals to be exploited, as usual, on the restart. A trick that would still have a certain "peculiarity" to it, if only we were still in 2001. In that sense, the echo of the moods of the memorable Pause is unmistakable.

By contrast, in "Harpsichord" it's the ecstatic, hypnotised Four Tet that comes out of its shell, almost ideally reconnecting with a certain reflective ambient music of the early '80s. To put it plainly: imagine a Deuter playing chess with Joanna Brouck. In short, expansive synths and new age on the horizon: nothing more "overused", and likewise nothing more "safe". Fully successful, on the other hand, are the electronic ascents in the vein of Minilogue placed at the centre of the record ("Love Salad", "Insect Near Piha Beach" and "Something in the Sadness"). A triple delight worthy of the best of times. Overall, though, Sixteen Oceans essentially brings out two sides of Four Tet: one conservative yet still "exploratory", and a more soporific one, expressed through a meditative mood that's anything but scintillating. An album, then, of alternating phases, one that may delight the faithful just as much as it bores "newcomers" in search of the sacrosanct showstopping flourish.

After Parallel, also from 2020, Hebden returns once again to the LP format with Three, in 2024. It's an album that represents, at the same time, a return to his roots and a synthesis of the many transformations his music has undergone. Almost completing a sampler of the possible variations on "Hebdenism", the steady beats of "Loved" recall the sound of Rounds, while "Gliding Through Everything" offers digital sounds and an ambient coda, with unexpected guitar elements. "Skater" veers toward an almost post-rock style, and "Daydream Repeat" combines noisy washes with a tech-house attitude. Reissued just weeks after release as Three+, the album was expanded with four additional tracks, which further broaden its stylistic range, in both the dance/future garage direction and the ambient and post- ones.

12", 7":

Double Density (4T Recordings), 1997: this is Kieran Hebden's first solo effort. It consists of two instrumental tracks, the first a Fridge-style post-rock number, the second a sound collage. Despite its distance from the "Four Tet style", you can already spot a predisposition toward warm sounds and repetitive ecstasy.

Falken's Maze (Joshua Falken), 1998: the most surprising of Hebden's "youthful" releases, again consisting of two tracks. The first is a techno/house cut with a strong Moroder-esque streak, miles away from anything Four Tet would go on to produce. It's essentially a climax that, amid electronic gurgles and unpredictable gusts of flute, allows Hebden to experiment with rhythm. The second track moves along downtempo lines, already showing jazz leanings and - above all - a remarkable ability to break down and reassemble hip-hop structures, here with accents very close to 2-step and faint echoes of drum'n'bass.

Glasshead/Calamine, 1999: on the first track of this 12", Four Tet seems to take its cue above all from Stereolab and their suspended atmospheres. The eruption of sturdy, jagged hip-hop rhythms, however, opens onto a more personal section, devoted to jazz but far looser than others from the period. The radio version of "Calamine" also emphasises the rhythmic drive, throwing itself into reckless moves reminiscent of the hardest-driving drum'n'bass.

I’m On Fire, 2002: a transitional release, picking up the downtempo pace of some earlier work. The two tracks are almost identical, differing only in the rhythm, which is more pronounced in the first and merely hinted at in the second.

She Moves She, 2003: besides the title track, also found on Rounds, this 12” contains “Cradle” — about as close as Four Tet has ever come to the elegiac quality of Sigur Rós.

My Angel Rocks Back And Forth, 2004: another 12” built around material from Rounds. There are two remixes (by Icarus and Isambard Khroustaliov) and two original tracks: “I’ve Got Viking In Me” and “All The Chimers”. The latter are little more than hasty, decidedly blurry ambient sketches: thoroughly negligible stylistic exercises, thrown in as filler alongside the two seductive remixes.

Sun Drums and Soil, 2005: the starting point here is the title track from Everything Ecstatic, first presented in its original mix, then handed to Sa-Ra for an enjoyable afro/acid jazz reworking. The most interesting piece, though, is “Sun Drums And Gamelan”, which makes explicit the influence that traditional Indonesian music — already dear to Steve Reich — had on Hebden. Indeed, the combination of polyrhythmic clattering, exotic flutes and hip-hop beats is almost indistinguishable from any other ordinary Four Tet track of that period.

Love Cry, 2009: alongside the title track, later included on There Is Love in You, this release features “Our Bells”: seven-odd minutes of bells and cowbells that feel more like a Dada joke than an actual composition.

Collaborations and remixes:

Rivers Become Oceans (with Rothko), 1999: a 12” containing two reworkings of material by Rothko, the ambient/post-rock trio led by Mark Beazley. The first track presents the Four Tet style in clearly defined form, here freed for the first time from dark-jazz references. Placid and repetitive, it lets the melodic loops drift into the background while attention is drawn to the rhythmic variation, foreshadowing one of the key devices of his music. The second track is a further reworking by Rothko themselves, of a more strictly post-rock character.

Four Tet v Pole (with Pole), 2000: a splendid EP in the form of a “double split”. A Four Tet track and a remix of one by the German producer Pole — a pioneer of dub-techno — followed by Pole's original and his remix of Four Tet's. Four Tet is unmistakable both in his own piece, suspended between minimalism, Dj Shadow-style abstract hip-hop and a few folk touches, and in his remix of Pole's track. The latter shows very pronounced Uk garage accents, making it to this day a unique piece in his catalogue.

DIV/ORCE Series #1 (with Hella), 2004: just two tracks on this 7” split: one for Four Tet, one for the Californian math-rock duo. Hebden's piece seems to want to recreate their percussive frenzy, but doesn't give up on sweet, playful, somehow hypnotic melody. Very delicate, despite the glitch cacophony.

A Tribute to Jef Gilson (with Mato), 2004: a split 12” paying homage to French jazz musician Jef Gilson. Four Tet reworks “Fable Of Gutenberg”, creating a hazy, psychedelic flow reminiscent of his Dialogue days. Truth be told, though, the more successful piece is Mato's, which makes use of Anne Wirz's splendid jazz vocals.

Remixes, 2006: two CDs. The first comprises twelve remixes made by Four Tet for other artists, the second as many made by other artists for Four Tet. It's all material available elsewhere, though not always easy to find. Either way, having it all gathered here makes for an impressive collection.

The quality is high but uneven — it must be said: Four Tet is at his best as a remixer when his sensibility is close to the original artist's (as with “Tics”, for Lars Horntveth of Jaga Jazzist) or when he has the nerve to turn the original on its head (as happens with the His Name Is Alive track and the aforementioned Pole piece); less so elsewhere. The remixes made by others are generally less sharp, though a few gems stand out.

Moth/Wolf Cub (with Burial), 2009: a much-talked-about 12” pairing Four Tet with his illustrious college friend William Bevan, aka Burial, the Dubstep producer most lionised by the indie crowd. Of the two long tracks, truth be told, it's the second that really stands out: in the first — enjoyable all the same — Four Tet's techno leanings pull a bit against Burial's urban atmospheres. In “Wolf Cub”, on the other hand, the two artists' shared gift for rhythmic deconstruction fuses together and conjures out of nowhere a 2-step/gamelan/r'n'b hybrid that, beyond any attempt at description, sounds like nothing heard before. The rest is down to Burial's foggy synths and Hebden's crystalline melodies: the resulting crescendo is immersive, enveloping, spiritual.

Nothing To See/Don’t Let Me Go (with Mala), 2010: a split with Mala of Digital Mystikz. Rather than leaning into Dubstep, as one might expect, Four Tet opts for a minimal tech/house track with very uniform rhythmic drive. The groove is slightly off-kilter and joyful as ever. A pleasant episode, in line with his recent output.

Ego/Mirror (with Burial and Thom Yorke), 2011: once again a 12” collaboration between the two heavyweights of English electronic music, this time with vocal contributions from the Radiohead frontman. The two tracks are actually minor episodes in all three artists' careers: pleasant digressions, undoubtedly classy, but ultimately not memorable. The most remarkable thing about the record is the sheer ease with which the three styles merge together.

If on the first track the three split their respective roles cleanly (Bevan on low frequencies, Hebden on highs, Yorke in the middle), on "Mirror" Four Tet takes a back seat, limiting himself to "coloring" Burial's future garage rhythms with his usual wood-block touches.

Live, DJ sets, mixed compilations:

Dj Mix, 2003: barely half an hour for this mixed compilation, which moves confidently between his favorite old and new picks. It ranges from Don Cherry's free jazz to Steve Reich's minimalism, touching on Hendrix, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Lightning Bolt and a good deal of American hip-hop.

LateNightTales, 2004: another compilation of other artists' tracks, though it contains one Four Tet piece hard to find elsewhere: "Castles Made Of Sand". For this generous hour-plus of music, Hebden opts for a mellow tone and plenty of tracks from friends. Alongside Koushik, Manitoba, Icarus and the much-loved Tortoise, there's also room for a British folk streak, represented by Linda Perhacs and Fairport Convention. A thoroughly enjoyable guided tour through Kieran Hebden's musical mind at the time.

Live in Copenhagen 30th March 2004, 2004: a limited-edition CD-R, available only through the Domino Records website. All the tracks come from Rounds and Pause: we're deep in the folktronica era here. These versions, however, bring out the noisier, more glitch-driven elements, resulting in an extremely compelling and dynamic sound. Dance temptations are still a way off, but the turn taken on Everything Ecstatic clearly has its roots here.

Live at the Spanish Club Melbourne 20th Jan 2006, 2006: a little over an hour of live material released online as a free download. It's material from Everything Ecstatic, plus a bit of Rounds: nothing essential, but the feeling is that in these versions the more recent tracks shine with a light missing from the originals. It's the older tracks that show their age: they only "work" when interference and glitches manage to distract from their weak rhythmic drive, and the attempts to compensate with a four-on-the-floor kick come across as rather clumsy.

Dj-Kicks, 2006: the most successful of the mixed compilations curated by Hebden. Excellent transitions and real momentum power this rollercoaster of styles and rhythms: it jumps from Cabaret Voltaire to the uber-proggy Heldon, with a good dose of techno slipping in between tracks. The Akufen/Animal Collective transition is galvanizing, as is the sudden emergence of Stereolab and Autechre, but above all it's "Pockets" that stands out as flawless, the first Four Tet track that can be traced to his new dance-oriented direction.

RA.102, 2008: a DJ mix for Resident Advisor magazine, with a minimal techno slant. A good hour-plus of music that flows smoothly, built on layering and hypnotic rhythms. What's missing, though, is a bit of flair: it's not cold, exactly — it's still Four Tet through and through, and even when the timbres turn genuinely alien, there are birds chirping somewhere in the background — but it's still a more anonymous set than you'd expect.

Much Love To The Plastic People, 2009: a mix available on SoundCloud that documents Hebden's style during his residency at Plastic People. It was actually a gift Four Tet made for the club's audience as a thank-you, handed out on CD at the final night of the residency. The coordinates are essentially tech/house, but there's also room for good old free jazz and a few tracks from the new album There Is Love In You.

Fact Mix 182, 2010: the mix for Fact Magazine pairs UK garage with minimal techno, but above all shows a Kieran Hebden completely at ease and in full command of his craft. His touch comes through clearly in the warm atmosphere and the hip-hop fragments that slip in effortlessly amid synthetic sounds and funky abstraction.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

Share on

This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition