Album of the Week: Four Tet ‘There Is Love In You’

Album of the Week: Four Tet ‘There Is Love In You’

29 January, 2010 | 7.32AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: album of the week, domino, four tet

In many ways, Kieran Hebden aka Four Tet has spent his life trying to be different. He strives day after day to create something that has never been done before.

Is it human nature, to always want more? Or do only true artists leave their mark on this earth before they inevitably turn into dust?

“The computer is a chance to do something completely new,” says Hebden, from his home in London. He speaks effortlessly, with the kind of quiet confidence a well-read classicist might describe the past. Except, Kieran Hebden always looks towards the future.

“When I pick up a guitar, it feels like the most explored instrument of all time,” he says. “Everything that can be done with a guitar, has been done, but the computer knows no boundaries. The possibilities are near infinite, and that is what excites me.”

Four Tet’s new album ‘There Is Love In You’ comes mightily close to achieving its maker’s goals. From the gentle choral waves of the album’s opener ‘Angel Echoes’, to the surreptitiously danceable ‘Love Cry’, the magical ‘Circling’, the loopy house of ‘Sing’, and the hypnotically intricate ‘Plastic People’, there’s a profound sense of stepping into the unknown.

Yet for all its wires, complicated electronic circuitry, and lonely computer beginnings, its foundation - its woods - feel so very old. With this album, Four Tet has constructed a fantasy world that few will not find mesmerising. It is our Album of the Week.

We met Four Tet for an in-depth chat about his fifth album, studio, and sometimes hectic life.

You’ve explored many different ideas through your Four Tet albums. What is the main theme of ‘There Is Love In You’?

I guess when I started out, it was pretty open-ended. The main thing for me, is to always try to do something different to what I’ve done before.

Like my improv work with Steve Reid, the jazz drummer. That was very different. Although having said that, I feel all the music I make has a certain sound. This album started with a kind of bliss concept. There was a certain atmosphere I was trying to achieve. Some of it was inspired by DJing - those moments that you can have in a club where there’s only a dark room with incredibly loud music - and you lose yourself, and it feels perfect.

There’s an undercurrent of club rhythms on ‘There Is Love In You’. Was that mainly inspired by your club night at Plastic People in London?

It’s a combination of that and my work with Steve. When I started working with Steve, he played much faster then I was used to. He introduced me to all sorts of rhythms, like African rhythms, and opened my eyes up to the possibilities of rhythm.

And then I’ve also been influenced by my DJing over the last couple of years. My rhythmic ideas have changed. There’s a 4/4 pulse throughout the album, and tracks like ‘Love Cry’ were actually conceived to be played out in a club, with its big build up.

It seems to have brought some uniformity to your rhythms.

My work has always been fairly repetitive, but this album is more repetitive in some ways, even though I didn’t set out to make repetitive music.

There are a number of producers that have influenced me in recent years, and Ricardo Villalobos is one of them. I love deceptively simple rhythmic patterns that sound incredibly simple, but are in fact highly complicated. I guess, the emphasis is on different places in the rhythm. I build things up in a different way on this album. With my older stuff, there were rolling snares and huge crashing cymbals. Now it builds more from the bass drums.

Having worked with Steve, can you explain some of the process that goes into your drums?

I generally have a certain feeling for what I want to have in my head - I have an idea of what I want to achieve.

Sometimes I manage to nail it, and sometimes it’s not want I anticipated. Working with a drummer like Steve Reid brings a different way of thinking.

Do you play drums?

No, I only use a computer - it’s my main instrument. One thing about my music is that it can only be made on a computer. I’ve always wanted to make music that everything you hear is humanly impossible. For me, one of the things I like most about my music are the bits that don’t sound human.

Where does your drive to sound like nobody else come from?

A lot of the musicians I admire - Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Derrick May - are people who came out and did something completely new. They were forward thinking, and they tried to create something that no one else had done before. It’s hard for me to compare myself to them though, as those guys are some of the greatest musicians of all time.

Why do you confine yourself solely to the computer? There is a lot of interesting experimentation going on with hardware too, like for instance, circuit bending.

The way I see it, when I started out making music 12 or 13 years ago, desktop and laptop computers looked pretty ridiculous. They were huge. So much has changed and become possible over the past 10 years.

I like it when people explore and work with circuit boards, but for me, to work solely with a computer is the fastest and most creative environment for me.

Ultimately, I’m driven by musical ideas. I could spend days and days rewiring circuit boards, but that would take me away from making music. I can’t even be bothered to push cables into a mixing desk!

Ignore the hardware then. So what software do you use?

I use a ton of different combinations. I use Ableton Live quite a lot, and AudioMulch sometimes too.

I use those mainly for creative things, to work on ideas, and to experiment with loops and sounds. And then I use Pro Tools for programming, sequencing, and arrangement. A lot of tracks I write were written solely in Pro Tools.

I love the fact that you can put one note into Pro Tools, mess with it so much, and make thousands of other sounds.

Like in the past, you’ve made entire tracks without using any bass sounds. Did you do the same on this record?

You don’t hear it instantly when you listen to my music, but most of it is made from heavily manipulated sounds and samples. I like to speed up or pitch down sound, and with filters there are infinte possiblities.

I don’t tend to make big ferocious basslines ever, which is a bit weird as I like a lot of that music. Maybe I just never had the right sounds [laughs].

On this album, I used bits of pure sine waves to create low basslines.

Have you experienced club culture or DJ culture much?

I got into clubs in such a weird way. Over the years, I got booked for one off events mainly off the back of my records, than for my reputation as a DJ.

The first time I ever went to a club was at The End at the age of 20, when I was invited to come and play. I had never ever been in front of two turntables!

So I played at clubs over the years, but it was only when I started a residency that I really got into it. The idea of being able to build a night through your DJ style really appealed to me.

I met Timo Maas, and he invited me to play with him at DC10 in Ibiza, and that felt refreshingly different, like nothing I had ever done before. After that, he asked me to host the lounge of The End for his club night, whilst he played in the main room.

That was a totally new experience for me, as it was a proper Saturday night house and techno event, and I had to play for eight hours straight.

It was very daunting and intense. I remember on the first night, I put a record on to mix things up a bit, and the crowd all turned and looked at me in total confusion

It was very daunting and intense. I remember on the first night, I put a record on to mix things up a bit, and the crowd all turned and looked at me in total confusion.

But I persevered, and after about a year I had the room going pretty well. Then James Holden invited me to play in the lounge for his Border Community nights at The End, and his crowd crossed over much more into my territory which was great. By the time that finished and The End closed for good, I was pretty confident that I could hold the floor for eight hours.

At least, I thought I knew how to program a DJ set, then I went and saw Theo Parrish play at Plastic People and was like ‘Wow, OK that’s how you DJ!’.”

So then I started my own night at Plastic People, and I loved it. To be able to play your kind of music all night is a liberating experience, but of course in the end you still have to play for the crowd.

I love DJing now. It is actually something I’m going to pursue a lot more in the future. It’s changing my sound as well, as you can hear from this album.

So you don’t mind playing for the crowd?

I’ve always believed in going out and entertaining people, and I’ve generally shied away from doing artsy multimedia events.

Even when I play live, I want to be in the more up for it places. I’ve never played at any seated events, for instance. It has always been my mentality that people should come to my events and have a good time.

DJing is even more full on. I really enjoy it, when there’s this back and forth thing between you and the audience.

You’ve shied away from playing artsy multimedia events, but people do seem to read a lot into the music of Four Tet. Everyone from The Guardian to out-there art magazines intellectualizes it. Why do you think that is?

I think I’m probably quite like that myself. I’m into very eclectic music, and I take it seriously. I’m the sort of person who reads books about classical music theory when I’m working on my album, even though I’m not listening to any classical music.

And if I put that into the music, and people completely ignored it that would be sad. At the same time, it’d freak me out if I only got booked to play at the Barbican. I love playing at places liked Bugged Out, or hearing my music on Skins.

Was that weird, to hear your music on a TV show about teenagers fumbling with each other around the back of bike sheds?

I think they used it on the first series. I feel flattered when I hear my music being used. And I really liked Skins because it reminded me of being a teenager. It feels great to be included.

I’ve always presented my music in a way that embraces a younger audience. For instance, the majority of my album advertising happens in the NME more than anywhere else, even though it’s not really something the magazine would cover.

For me, it’s more fun somehow to try and turn people onto my stuff that might otherwise not hear it. One of my biggest thrills recently was hearing Zane Lowe play my music on his Radio 1 show.

I just did the Essential Mix for Radio 1 this past weekend too. And I’m going in for a review show in a couple of weeks where I have to listen to and review the current crop of pop and X Factor hits.

I love that. One minute I’ll be talking about free jazz and Steve Reid to some obscure artsy magazine in America, and the next I’m talking about Cheryl Cole on Radio 1.

I love mixing all those things together, it’s fun for me. You know I’ll go and see a really boring rock band, and wonder what it’s like to be the keyboard player who only has to play two notes in every song, night after night. I don’t want to be that guy in the music industry.

Do you think we’ve got anywhere near the realm of possibility with computer-based music?

If I’m feeling depressed, I’ll think that slowly we’re coming full circle. As time goes by, Aphex Twin’s stuff begin to sound more and more like the earliest work of Stockhausen. Some of the initial ideas in electronic music were so brilliant, that we’ve been slowly slipping away from that genius ever since.

But then, if I’m optimistic, as a kid I would have never believed that drum & bass could have ever existed. It never would have crossed my mind that something so fast and so raw, could become so popular that it even made onto shampoo adverts on TV.

So maybe people will come out with new sounds that completely refresh everything. I think drum & bass was the most intense and fresh thing that has ever happened to electronic music during my lifetime.

Although dubstep, two-step, and garage, they’re all pretty exciting too, and all quite new.

Are there any ideas or issues that you’d like to explore one day through your music, but now is not the right time?

I’m sure there are all sorts of things. I always think ‘Ok, I’ve got to aim big. I want to do something that is more and more ambitious.

I want to push musical ideas. A lot of the music I listen to is jazz music, or political, or spiritual. A lot of the music today, has quite a bland agenda. Imagine if someone made ‘A Love Supreme’ record again.

What about pop music? That would be pretty unexpected from you.

No, I don’t want to make anything that’s really out there or bizarre, I just leave things open in the studio. Quite often, I don’t have a perception of how my music is.

I’ll do something that I think is quite poppy, and I’ll have people say it’s the weirdest thing they’ve ever heard. I believe quite strongly in the old hip hop attitude - that nothing’s more important than keeping it real. As long as what I do is honest, I’m happy. I’d rather do that, than try to be something I’m not.

Do you ever turn down any remix requests from major labels?

I get offered some pretty ridiculous stuff from time to time. I got offered to do a remix of Dido! I listened to it, and I couldn’t see at all how it would work out well for both of us.

I would destroy her record because I didn’t like it, and she’d be pissed off with me forever. I’d rather avoid those types of problems [laughs].

How much of your studio work is trial and error, and how much of it is planned?

It’s about 50/50 I’d say. Half of it is messing around with ideas, and the other half is stumbling onto something that ends up being a brilliant starting point. I have happy accidents occasionally.

Are there any happy accidents on ‘There Is Love In You’?

‘Love Cry’ was one of the first tracks I completed for the album. I had the drums finished first and I was really happy with them. But when I started trying to add instruments to them, the drums just weren’t working out.

So I asked myself, ‘What’s the least obvious thing Four Tet would do?’. A lightbulb went on in my head: vocals. I’d never done vocals before, and no one would ever expect that. So I started messing about with vocal sounds, in a kind of Todd Edwards style.

Vocals became my new thing, and so long as I used them in unexpected ways, it would fit with my sound. Little things like that happened throughout the album.

You’ve never really used vocals before this album. Is that because they were too human for you?

Vocals is not really a sound I’ve experimented much with. I think the vocal influence came from dance music, classic house and garage. The chopped up vocals comes from garage. I’d never work with a vocalist directly - I’d hate to have a vocalist try to match their lyrics and voice to my music, or vice versa.

Do you think the vocal influence might have come from your work with Burial?

Probably. The way Burial works with vocals is inspiring. A lot of his stuff is a nod to classic garage. Looking back, I think I did make ‘Love Cry’ around the same time I was working on music with him.

I remember watching how he used vocal samples, and it definitely is the sound of now. There are so many records around at the moment that have those chopped up vocals.

Like Joy Orbison?

Yeah, I really like Joy Orbison’s stuff and I think every record he has put out has chopped up vocals.

I first heard his stuff on Myspace, but even though he has put out so few tracks his sound is so identifiable. It’s quite extraordinary. He did a remix of ‘Love Cry’ for me that I was really happy with.

There seems to be a lot of fresh young producers coming out of the UK at the moment.

I really like the new generation that are coming through. Everyone was going on about dubstep for a while, but it was getting darker and darker. I wondered how it was all going to work out.

And then suddenly a whole new load of producers appeared who took the dubstep sound, but changed it by adding new rhythmic ideas and putting twists on everything.

It feels exciting. The flood gates have been opened and the genre pots have all been stirred. There are a lot of people actively trying to make different sounding records now.

The best moment of 2-step and drum & bass for me, was when people were trying to make different records. That’s going on right now, but all those different sounds are also working together.

You’ll listen to a set on Rinse FM, and there’ll be funky house, old 2-step, current grime and dubstep in one set. They’re all supposedly separate but work so well together too.

What sort of sounds do you play when you DJ?

All those sorts of sounds I suppose. I’ll play old Detroit techno, next to minimal German techno, old disco, soul, and jazz. My favourite DJs all play very eclectic, like Theo Parrish or Trevor Jackson.

I love those moments in a club when a DJ manages to put something on that’s completely unexpected and the crowd don’t go, ‘Oh shit he has ruined it’.

I saw Derrick Carter at The End once, and he played a Fleetwood Mac record in the middle of his set. It was brilliant.

Some of the biggest records at my club night at Plastic People were African highlife tracks, and jazz records, alongside a current Roska record. If I can make all those different music genres work together then that’s great.

If you’re a good DJ, you know when it’s time to mix carefully from one to the other, and when to just drop in a new track. As long as you don’t ruin it for the crowd.

Sample-based electronic music can sometimes seem like a race to the obscure. When you record sounds, or look for samples, what are you looking for exactly?

I think that’s where I’ve got my own, unquantifiable taste. I have a certain taste for rhythms and sounds, and my music has a certain sound.

I’ve kept a sample diary for 10 years on my computer, which acts as a huge archive of sound that I can pull from. If I sample something, I’ll stick it in there.

I have millions of drum machine samples. I might sit down tonight and play out a melody on the guitar, record it, and then store it on the computer and forget about it. I might not use it for five years, and then rediscover it and use it in a track.

Did you rediscover anything like that to use in your new album?

There are some sounds on the LP that I hadn’t seen for seven or eight years. For example, years ago I had a Yamaha Tenori-On, that I used to take everywhere with me when I travelled.

I was working on ‘Sing’, track No.5 on my album, and was desperately looking for some bubbly synth sounds. Totally by chance, I discovered this old melody I had written on the Tenori-On that fitted perfectly into the piece. It sounds like it was composed for the piece, but it was pure luck.

With such a big archive to choose from, surely it must get pretty stressful sometimes, with so much choice?

[laughs] Yeah, it can be stressful sometimes. But sometimes a track will come together in one hour. I’ve got the archive set up in quite a ‘hiddly-piddly’ way, so surprises can happen. I’m not one of those guys who files his records alphabetically. Happy accidents can be powerful.

How big is your record collection?

I have a growing record collection. I get rid of lots of stuff though. I chuck stuff out all the time. With the DJing, I have been buying lots of records recently.

I’m quite a heavy collector of old jazz and library records, and early electronic music. I just love the music.

I listen to vinyl than anything. I haven’t moved over to iTunes yet and don’t think I ever will.

Why not?

A year or so ago, life was getting hectic for me, and I was spending more time replying to emails about flights, than I was listening to and making music. I want to be able to listen to at least one complete record per day, both sides.

When I make an album, I listen to music a lot. People always ask what were my biggest influences but it’s everything I listen to really. One night I’ll listen to a whole Neil Young album and think how brilliant it is, and it’ll inspire me to make music.

I like the ritual of actually putting a record on. You engage more with it. I like reading the sleeve and looking at the artwork.

Where do you go record shopping?

I visit a lot of record fairs. The last one I went to was Europe’s biggest record fair in Utrecht. I was lucky to get a DJ gig in Utrecht at the same time as the fair, so I went looking and buying. I always find wonderful things.

There’ll be a dealer from somewhere like Greece, and he’ll have all this weird Greek electronic music. In those places, you find music that you’ll not find anywhere else.

How do you feel about digital?

I don’t mind digital. Great music still comes out on digital. On Beatport I find great music all the time, stuff that I missed when it was first released.

Think about how Beatport will look in 10 years. It’ll be like the world’s biggest and weirdest record shop. It’ll be amazing. There’ll be all this stuff hidden in the archives that when it first came out didn’t quite work, but 10 years later it sounds brilliant.

So everyone will be able to go back and start trawling through it all again. The fact that so much music is being archived by digital is important. That is the future, and it will be insane. It’s pretty wild.

I can’t imagine what it will be like to be a teenager in future generations. When I grew up, it took me six months to track down a record that I read about in a magazine. Now you can listen to a track on YouTube in 15 seconds.

I think that’s maybe why there are some really amazing young producers around at the moment, because they have so much access to music. Their influences are so broad.

I’ve been talking to this 21-year-old producer called Floating Points about music recently, and even though he’s only been around for such a short amount of time, he’s influenced by old disco and jazz, and he’s making a hybrid of old Detroit techno, Chicago house, and 2-step.

Finally, you’ve said in the past that the music industry bores you - the fact that you have to do press, and interviews like this, to alert people to your music. So how does it feel to be awarded something like Album of the Week on Beatport?

The interviews make me a bit mental. I get emails at the moment that say things like ‘Will you do 15 more American interviews tomorrow’? Or I’ll get a phone call from Singapore saying “What message do you have for your fans in Singapore?”

It’s a weird time when your album comes out. I did an interview with this guy from America yesterday and he really assumed that I was a careerist and only in it for the money.

He was asking stuff like, ‘Is it your dream to have your music one day on an American TV commercial?’, and ‘How do you plan to get the executives interested in your music?’

I thought to myself, ‘Hang on, working with a 64-year-old drummer, and putting out four albums of experimental electronic music is hardly the most commercial of moves!’.

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