A little while back, I was struck by the realisation that I hated Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet. Sure, I was receptive to his stuff once upon a time: I even bought his first album for my mum for Christmas. Probably copied a few of his CDs from the library and stuff. I’m pretty sure I even heard him play ‘live’ once, in a little festival tent crammed with pot-smoking head-nodders.

But no. Things change. I don’t remember what kind of circumstance I was in, when I found myself listening to Fourtet’s latest ‘platter’, maybe 5, 6, 7 years ago or something, but suddenly, I understood the nature of what I had unwittingly been participating in.

I mean, who DOES this bastard think he is? Tinkering with fragments of all these vital and exciting forms of music – techno, jazz, afro-beat, hip-hop and so on – then systematically proceeding to drain them of any HINT of anger or rebellion, normalising them to the extent that you probably did an eye-roll just hearing me mention their names in quick succession, drizzling dinky little bits of them around into these precious little confections of tasteless, background-y nothing. Just… fuck this guy, man. He’s Moby with A levels. ‘Party’ music for people who think putting on Motown Chartbusters would be beneath them. The sonic equivalent of Giles Peterson reading extracts from a book about living in a remote Peruvian village at the Barbican centre. A status quo reinforcing MURDERER of all the things that give popular music its lifesblood. Blinded with rage, I didn’t just want to cease listening to Mr. Four Tet, I wanted to smash his face into bloody pieces.

So, as you’ll appreciate it, I thought it would probably be for the best if we kept our distance after that. If Kieran stayed out of my way, I’d stay out of his... and so things have been, since then. So I don’t know what he’s been up to recently, or what progression his career has taken of late.

But, like I say, things change.

Fast forward to NOW, and the other week I heard a couple of cuts from the new Four Tet album on the radio. And I confess, I actually found them pretty compelling. Not what I was expecting at all.

Apparently the story vehind this one is that he’d been living in Woodstock in upstate New York for some reason, getting into a lot of the ‘70s hippie type New Age music that presumably accompanies life in such a locale, and he thought he’d try to make a record along those lines. A fairly trendy pursuit of recent, you might think, but the genius of it is that, for reasons equally vague and unfathomable, Hebden decided that his primary source material in this endeavour should be chopped up samples from ‘90s pirate radio recordings, Jungle-era DJ bootlegs, and that sort of thing.

The results are pretty interesting – often strange, sometimes flat-out mental, and occasionally verging on brilliance.

The rhythm tracks in particular here are assembled in a really rough, instinctive manner that seems completely antithetical to the carefully polished blandness of Four Tet’s earlier work, as tiny fragments of unidentifiable drum-beats are jammed together in monotonous, crudely chopped loops that sound like the result of some clueless kid manually splicing tapes in 1980s basement. Weird vocal fragments (“HE – HEY – HAY!”) jab in and out of the mix in a spirit of unhinged randomness, treated with cheesy reverse and digital echo effects that seem to almost push things into the realm of ‘outsider art’ – rave music made on the cheap by a teeth-grinding, arhythmic lunatic.

Such abrasive ingredients seem distinctly at odds with Hebden’s stated wish to create ‘new age’ music, but nonetheless, remainders of the record’s cosmic relaxation-based intent keep asserting themselves, with the disjuncture between form and intent leading to many bizarre and wondrous moments...

Tubular bells and random wind chime drift in over a dense mess of junglist fragments and a man repeatedly saying “good old broccoli, jus-“; R’n’B (modern definition) female cooing is reverbed up and used in the manner of a Tangerine Dream synth line; waves of ‘Journey in Satchidananda’ harp gently wash in across impenetrable pirate FM ranting; single snare hits loop like metronomic machine guns for minutes on end; Flat Eric distorted techno riffs bust into a degraded ten second loop of a DJ who appears to be having some kind of paranoid breakdown; creepy, tremoloed baby voices hum like swarming insects…

In short: I know Four Tet isn’t exactly the hippest name in inner-city, post-everything Hype Williams type electronica, but I defy you to get stuck into this one with the headphones on and tell me some of this shit is anything less than fucking NUTS.

Of course, I’ve very deliberately been concentrating on the most far-out bits of the album thus far; sad to say that at the end of the day it goes fall somewhat short of being a full scale work of mad genius that we could hail from the East London rooftops. The old conventions of smug smoothness and exploitative, chill-vibe sampling do rather reassert themselves on the second half of the album, smudging and smothering the craziness of what has come before. The two closing tracks in particular are quite dull – very much the sort of thing Peterson or someone could play without ringing many alarm bells – but on the whole, this record is so much more wild and invigorating than anything I ever expected to ever hear from Four Tet, I don’t really mind.

From what I gather, he went for the full ‘no press / sudden self-release / pay-what-you-like download’ approach to releasing this album, perhaps suggesting that he too is feeling a bit cheesed off with his overly comfortable position in the music world. I hope so! I gather many of his fans have been rather perturbed and blindsided by it. Good, I suppose.

In fact, maybe more than anything it is the expectations associated with the Four Tet name that will stop this album finding it’s real audience. Given the sheer weirdness of some of the stuff on the first half, he might have been better off inventing some maniac Lee Perry type alter-ego to attribute it all to. He could have written a suitably fruity press release full of bone-chilling hardships and fuzzy-headed, medicated goings-on, thrown these tunes out there as the legendary lost master tapes recovered from a skip behind blah, bah blah, got some deep-digging resissue label to put it out, and the cult that would have formed, ready to testify at a moment’s notice to its unearthy beauty and cracked imagination, would have assembled INSTANTLY. With rubes like me in the front line, most likely.

I’m SURE he could’ve got away with that. But in a way, I’m glad he was honest and came straight out with it – even giving the whole thing a cover design and title that couldn’t be more blandly Four Tet-like if it tried. It gives us all a real nice surprise. Reminds us that we should never write a guy off too easily (that being something I tend to do far too often in music). I’m still not entirely sure where he’s going with all this, but…. for the first time in history, I care, and that definitely marks some kind of success.

---

I won't bother linking, because you can probably get this any place.

Labels: album reviews, Four Tet