Kieran Hebden, who makes electronic music under the name Four Tet, feels the same way about the hardware and software behind his computer-generated music that a gnarled old delta bluesman might feel about his beat-up, no-brand guitar ? it's maybe not the best equipment out there, but it's good enough to make the music sound just the way he wants it. It's an attitude that wrecks the mistaken logic that better computers beget better electronic music.
"I'm not that fussed about the technological side of it all. I'd rather just worry about the music," Hebden said in a telephone interview from his apartment in Camden, north London. "I don't want to be in that situation where you have tonnes of equipment and end up playing with equipment instead of playing music."
For the record, though, Hebden uses Windows-based PCs that anyone with NT$15,000 could pick up at the Guanghua computer market, the key components being a mass-market Creative Soundblaster sound-card and a speedy hard-drive running Cakewalk, Audiomulch and Cool Edit -- the reliable old work-horses of home-studio applications. Onstage, he plays two laptops and occasionally an additional gadget or two, all running through a standard DJ mixer.
Given his simple tools and non-techy outlook, Hebden may seem an odd choice for someone widely regarded as the current vanguard in electronica, doubly so because his music isn't propped up by the blips and beeps that one might expect from the genre. There are still electronica's characteristic machine sounds and moody atmospherics, but the dominating feel of the music has an organic sensibility provided by classic instrumentation underpinned by gritty, old-school beats.
His composite sound originates in samples of standard instruments, like drums, guitar, even a harp, that are spliced and manipulated beyond recognition and then painstakingly arranged into seamless and surprisingly listenable instrumental mixes. It's a style that falls somewhere between jazz, hip hop, folk and house. And if the intersection of those musical styles didn't exist before, Hebden's achievement in his three Four Tet albums to date has been to carve out this new territory and unite its disparate listeners with an unusual sound. It's also a highly marketable and popular sound, as Four Tet's opening band slots on tours for groups such as Radiohead and Stereolab and a slew of rave reviews for his latest album Rounds would testify.
There are no noticeable patterns to the way Four Tet songs are constructed, but the unifying threads between each are the jumpy percussion softened by the mournful sounds of a jumble of string instruments and those distant electric or underwater noises that suggest something epic to a song.
The intentionally melodramatic, story-
telling feel of the songs sets his sound apart from the jagged experimental fringe of electronic music and steers it closer to post-rock and even, dare we say it, certain strains of New Age. Hebden is also the founding member of the post-rock band Fridge.
"I think the Four Tet music that I make is usually music I make at home in the private moments of my life," he said. "I like to make music that sounds kind of optimistic even if does sound gloomy in places. I like that kind of happy cheesiness in life."
Each album, and Rounds in particular, was conceived as a whole and is intended to be listened to from beginning to end, leading the listener through differing moods, some inconsolable, like the track My Angel Rocks Back and Forth, some elated, like Twenty-Three, before gently dropping us back to reality.
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