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.
Along the way, one gets the impression of having listened to a condensed and curiously melodic compilation of the past century's musical styles.
"One of the main ideas about what I do is a huge openness to the history of music ... I make music that sits a little bit with all ... styles," he said.
The main challenge for Hebden as a musician, whose base material is samples, has been to generate something new that doesn't sound like the sum of its influences, or like music that could be picked apart and its original composers identified. Much has been made, for example, of the heavily reverential nods to free jazz on his first album Dialogue (1997), which he himself critiques. But with free jazz out of his system, a more distinct sound emerged gradually through greater experimentation on his second album Pause (2001) and now with Rounds.
"I want to make music that has its own sound as well. The music I admire most in the world and enjoy most usually sounds as though it's come out of nowhere. You can't imagine where these ideas came from."
In this area, he looks up to producers like Timbaland, Missy Elliot and Neptunes, hip hop's contemporary pioneers in the art of taking something old and adding new and completely unprecedented twists.
"If you take things and reinvent them without trying to trigger people's nostalgia, then I think you make something new ... I don't think that in 100 years' time people are going to have forgotten about hip hop and just remember James Brown."
Hebden says Four Tet songs begin as ideas that are as likely to be triggered by a sound overheard at breakfast, as by a fortuitous experimentation with a sample. A sound can trigger almost immediately an entire composition in his mind, or it can provide merely the initial clue to the possibility of a song.
"Sometimes it's just happy sorts of accidents. Suddenly I'll play something backwards or at the wrong speed and it'll sound unexpectedly good," he said.
From that point the composition process can be swift, sometimes just a matter of a few hours, as he brings the samples together in a way that faithfully repeats the sounds playing in his head. To hear him explain it, composing appears simple. But even on relatively basic applications like Cakewalk, a standard horizontal interface editing tool, and Audiomulch, a non-linear editing shareware program, quantizing the beats and arranging the sounds in an innovative manner requires a total mastery of his tools, something he's gained in the seven years since he got his first computer while at college.
Four Tet's music, like all music made in a non-real time environment, presents a unique challenge when translated to live performance. But again, the simplicity of Hebden's chosen tools provides a solution. On his laptops he runs his standard three programs set on loop mode and with simple drag and drop he builds his songs from scratch, tweaking sounds here and there, adding new samples that don't exist on the album or changing the levels so that elements of a song obscured in the background on the album are suddenly at the foreground.
"[Live shows are] a lot more aggressive than the album. The music's kind of been evolving since the record came out through the live shows. So, versions you hear of tracks become quite different. Some of the tracks that I play now are versions that will last, like, 25 minutes long."
This suggests that now, after Rounds has been out for a year, the audience at The Wall tomorrow can expect something entirely different from the meandering, cozy tracks on that album. But what it will sound like, even Hebden couldn't say.
"It's different every time, but it's usually pretty mad."
For anyone who can't make it tomorrow's show, Hebden will DJ at Boven cafe on Sunday at a show called Post-Everything No. 3, which starts at 4pm.
Performance notes:
What: Four Tet
Where: The Wall, B1, Roosevelt Blvd, Sec 4, Taipei (
When: Tomorrow 8pm
Tickets: NT$650 in advance at The Wall, Norwegian Wood, 4AM Cafe, Nowhere, Impo Records and the National Theater and Concert Hall ticketing system. NT$850 at the door.
Post-Everything: at Boven, 437 Zhongshan N Rd, Sec 5, Taipei (
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