Intensity Most impressive, and unusual, is that he’s still producing “I grew up on the two-step garage sound, people like MJ
And so after ‘Everything Ecstatic’ came a project with music on a scale that is so lo-fi, it’s quite baffling. Other Cole, so when I heard Joy Orbison it was a sound that was
more intensity still. He met drummer Steve Reid, a than a vintage synth lent to him by Radiohead producer linking back to all that, the way he was using the vocals.
borderline legendary percussionist and jazz musician, Nigel Godrich (he toured with the band in 2003), Four Tet The mix he delivered couldn’t have been more perfect.”
whose CV includes work with titans like James Brown, material is produced entirely on “a PC plugged into a
Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Fela Kuti and Miles Davis. From hi-fi” with Pro Tools. He once bitterly disappointed a While these elements have converged to create the Four
2006 onwards, they produced four albums, ‘The pro-sound magazine who’d come to interview him with Tet sound, Hebden remains a source of constant surprise.
Exchange Sessions Volumes 1 and 2’, ‘Tongues’ and ‘NYC’. his miniscule set-up. “People divide music up with rigid barriers. Records like
“He’s a master of rhythm,” says Hebden. “From the “Rather than spend hours reading a software manual, I’d [Shanks & Bigfoot’s] ‘Sweet Like Chocolate’ sit next to
moment we met, we got on like friends straight away. rather be making a record,” he says. things like ‘Windowlicker’ for me, with not much to
Something that might have been just one show has separate them. ‘Sweet Like Chocolate’, I still get goose
turned into years touring the world, and four albums. By Always forward-thinking, it’s not surprising that Hebden bumps from that record, the sound of the bass, the
the time I came to start working on new solo music again has embraced the new UK sounds of grime and dubstep production, it’s on another level. People look at me
my whole perception had changed. It had given me a too. A recent untitled project, a two-track 12” single strangely when I play it!
completely new education in the concept of rhythm.” featuring the tracks ‘Moth’ and ‘Wolf Cub’, found him “I’ll pull as much from that as some crazy jazz record. At
recording with Burial, who turned out to be an old school the Border Community night I played Shakira’s ‘She
At utterly the other end of the musical scale, and around friend (Hebden was among the tiny handful of people Wolf’, just the straight-up album version. I can talk to
the same time he met Reid, he met Timo Maas. And while who knew just who Burial was, before he decided to James Holden about ‘Sweet Like Chocolate’ and
one could imagine that Reid’s influence has been pivotal reveal his identity around the time of his Mercury Prize ‘Windowlicker’ in the same sentence. I don’t feel I’m on
in Hebden’s musical development, Maas too had an nomination). Joy Orbison has been tapped, too, to remix my own.”
indirect input in creating ‘There Is Love In You’, the new the single ‘Love Cry’.
Four Tet album (out 25th January on Domino). It’s
almost a logical progression to see Reid and Hebden in
the studio together, given their love of rhythm and jazz,
but Maas took him in a far more unexpected direction —
to the Balearics.
“Timo invited me to come and play at DC-10 in Ibiza with
him. I played a really experimental live set for the first
two hours, and then he did his full-on, all-night Ibiza
thing. He’s a great guy, we hit it off straight away. I was
in Ibiza in a quite out of the ordinary context, but totally
on my own terms, and I thought, ‘This is kind of cool’.
“So Timo asked me to join him at his residency at The
End, and said that if I really wanted to experience this
thing, that I should do all-night sets.”
And so it happened. The darling of the leftfield electronic
scene got his club on.
“Timo would do the main room and I would do the
lounge. It was really refreshing. I was thrown in at the
deep end. I’d never played sets that long, or sets that had
to rely on 4/4 music. I did it for a year, and I was loving it.
I learned how to DJ.”
He then hooked up with James Holden’s Border
Community, a label that he had begun to devour, and
that also had a night at The End.
“James’s album was really an inspirational record for me.
I did that night for a year and a half and by the end, I
thought, ‘I’ve got it down. I can keep a room going for
eight hours.’”
Dancefloor Bliss
‘There Is Love In You’ is, unsurprisingly, flush with
moments of pure dancefloor bliss. Following the closure
of The End, Hebden decamped to East London’s Plastic
People, an intimate venue that engenders fanaticism
from its patrons, thanks in the main to its peerless
soundsystem. Tracks like ‘Love Cry’ he roadtested for
months on end, taking it back to the lab, tweaking it, and
then trying it out again until it was perfect. And it is
perfect — a building, throbbing mass of shuffling funk.
The track ‘Plastic People’ is, unsurprisingly, a tribute to a
club that has become his home. Meanwhile, tracks like
‘Circling’ and ‘This Unfolds’ are full of those elements of
spine-tingling trance produced by the likes of William
Orbit and Underworld in their respective heydays. Not
that ‘There Is Love In You’ feels in any way dated, in the
same way that his previous albums still feel as fresh as
they did a decade after they were recorded.
There are vocals littered around the album too, the first
time he has used them in what is predominantly an
instrumental body of work.
044
www.djmag.com
DJ481.fourtet_feature.indd 44 2/12/09 16:26:26
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