Interview – Four Tet
Innovator, aural mystifier and possible musical genius are all terms that can be attributed to Kieran Hebden, the man behind the Four Tet production moniker. Having been producing works of ethereal and often brain lurching scintillation for the past eight years, the name Four Tet is now synonymous with a growing echelon of electronic artists who have stepped beyond the realms of genre to embrace the wild side of production.
As electronic music continues to diversify, the ethos behind Kierans Four Tet work is simplistic for a man whose music is often anything but. “There’s just my kind of interest in pursuing and taking music forward and putting forth new ideas – I’m really interested in trying to do something different, not just trying to copy people who have come before me, but to make a statement of my own.”
Weaving complex beats in glitchy, erratic timings with sampled indulgences of oddly vibrant instruments, Four Tet is a continually evolving work of art that has more in common with freeform jazz music than any of its other electronic music genre counterparts.
“I purposely set things up over the years to have as few limitations as possible,” Kieran remarks, “so that it’s open to whatever interests I want to put forth. Every new record I put out, people are expecting something different, some new idea.”
The journey from unknown producer to globe straddling maestro is evident in his body of work, and for each piece he releases, the evolution of his journey is evident, a fact that has also worked out according to his own personal ethos. “I’m hoping that the records evolve over time and make sense in different ways, I’m really interested in the idea of how time affects music and how it sounds one way when you first hear it, then two years down the line it sounds different.”
As a producer, his work does not stop evolving outside of the studio, and he pursues his evolving sounds – creating live performances that are more than the sum of their initial parts. “The live sets and studio work sound quite far apart – I’m not worried about recreating the album in any way when I play live, it’s more about giving people a kind of taste of where my music is at on that day, at that moment. When I start playing a track I don’t know quite how long or short it will be, its very spur of the moment – to the point where a lot of the stuff in the show I’m creating things there and then.”
With such a juxtaposed output, whereby his creations are both simultaneously simplistic and eerily complex, Kieran also finds himself aware of his own, though infrequent, overindulgence. “I think sometimes it’s all a bit too much a product of its own influence, like I’ve fallen in love with a record and tried to squash it all together – recently I’ve tried to push beyond that, putting my own sound and spirit into it. I find a lot of the time I find myself making music because I’m trying to make a record that I’m looking for that doesn’t really exist.”
With his upcoming journey back to our shores for the second time, there is no telling what may be on the menu, and yet one can’t help but think that the ever changing entity that is Four Tet has something special on the agenda.
“We’ll have to see how it all goes down on the night, “Kieran remarks laconically, “I don’t really plan these things. You’ll just have to turn up and see what happens.”
Tags: four tet, Kieran Hebden