Photo by Jason Evans
While known in some 90s-music circles for his work in the post-rock band Fridge, Kieran Hebden began to make more noise under his own project, Four Tet, at the start of the 21st century. His first two albums, Dialogue and Pause, received attention, as did a breakout remix of Aphex Twin for Warp’s 10+3 compilation. But it was when he released Rounds in May of 2003 that Four Tet’s profile soared, signifying the arrival of one of the more intriguing electronic music figures of the last decade. Just two years on from Radiohead’s IDM-embracing Kid A, a new generation of music makers were moving into indie sounds weaned on hip-hop breaks and the likes of Aphex and Boards of Canada. Four Tet’s Rounds showed how-- armed with only a laptop and a penchant for gentle melodic figures-- a stirring type of beat-driven music could be crafted.
This week sees a 10th anniversary edition of Rounds, with bonus material in the form of a live recording from Copenhagen in March 2004 showing just how quickly Hebden was moving from those pastoral sounds towards noise, free jazz, and heavier beats. Against a backdrop of the Ashokan Reservoir on a gray, rainy day, I met with Hebden in a cabin he rented up in Woodstock for the season to discuss how he ended up with his signature sound, possibly producing for RiFF RAFF, spiritual jazz, and the woes of being labeled “folktronica.”
I was listening to Joni Mitchell and trying to make a record like Blue. And no one really seemed to understand my influences at all, which was frustrating.
Pitchfork: How did you start making music?
KH: I was playing guitar first and then I had a four-track. I never had a sampler. I could never ever make a loop off of a record, and it was all I wanted to do-- there were four or five years of wishing and dreaming I could just loop something off a record, but I didn’t have a piece of equipment that could get me to that. And samplers were expensive at the time, so I couldn’t sample anything at all. But I had millions of ideas about it.
In college, one of the first things I did was get a student loan and buy my first ever computer. The guys from Simian Mobile Disco-- way before they were Simian Mobile Disco-- were in my computer science study course and they gave me this software for a program called Cakewalk. I was able to sample records and sequence them for the first time ever. That’s when the whole Four Tet thing started.
Pitchfork: You recently released some of your earliest recordings on the 0181 album. What was it like going back to the root of your music as Four Tet?
KH: I found these old CD-Rs with all these old files from back then, and I had to go online and try to find a pirated copy of Cakewalk that I needed to open them. I went through them and there were lots of bits that I liked, and that’s when I had this idea to make this collage out of it rather than have the music just disappear.
Pitchfork: What was the most cringe-worthy aspect of it?
KH: Just that they were late-90s, cheesy kind of breakdowns. Big beat and Chemical Brothers and all that sort of stuff happened around then and the way people were mixing and doing drums just wasn’t so elegant. I found a lot of it heavy handed. I was so into hip-hop at the time, endlessly listening to DJ Premier or Pete Rock. The first thing I did was [1998's] Thirtysixtwentyfive. It’s crazy that the first thing I made was this 40-minute track, but for me it was made up of like five years of ideas I had in my head. I was just making stuff very, very fast. I didn’t think about its relevance to any music that was going on at the time, didn’t think about anything at all.
When a musician starts out, you’ve got this naive period that you never ever get back again. It’s the reason why people like so many acts' first albums a certain way, because they lose something after that. I definitely got that period really well documented. I’d released three or four albums before I even actually sat there and thought, "What on earth am I even trying to do here? What’s any of this about?"
Pitchfork: So was Rounds the first time you sat down and thought about what you wanted to put forth?
KH: Rounds was the first time I thought, "I want to make something that has some absolute relevance. After Pause, I was quite critical of what I’d done. I’d listen to the stuff I’d put out and my main criticism was that it was just a product of its influences, that this just sounds like I’ve heard some records that are really cool-- a krautrock record, a jazz record, and an Aphex Twin record-- and I’ve just squashed them together. That realization frustrated me. I needed something that was more my own, and that was something I was trying to do with Rounds.
Up until then, I didn’t care remotely about titles: It’d be a day before the album had to be turned in, and I’d just choose a whole bunch of random words and chuck them on everything. So with Rounds, I really connected with the idea that I needed to make something more personal, something real that counted. I started to give the songs titles that were a little more personal to me, and people really responded to that. I realized there were no words or anything in my music, nothing that people would have to draw them in a little bit more. So I saw that that made a massive difference, it gave the music a slightly more magical feel somehow.
Pitchfork: So that people could connect with it?
KH: Yeah. It had to have a lot of me in it for it to be relevant. At that point, I was very wrapped up in this idea that making music was really important, that it was fully intertwined in my day-to-day life. I definitely had no aspirations to go to a studio or anything. It felt more important to me that there was a possibility that I could work on a piece of music while I ate my cereal in the morning because I was more likely to make something intimate and personal doing that than if I was going into a studio.
I was thinking that if I managed to just sit on my own at two in the morning after a night out with my friends, I might come out with something, because all the best things I was making were coming out at the weirdest times. I was living on my own and I’d had a relationship end at the beginning of Rounds. And then there was a big relationship-- with my future wife-- that commenced towards the end of making it. Loads of stuff was happening to me and I was very conscious of it all and really got into the idea that making this music was all part of that. When I listen to the record, I’m never gonna listen to it like anybody else listens to it. I listen to it more like reading an old diary; it’s tied up with a million memories of things that happened.
Pitchfork: Is it linear in that way, with the breakup in the beginning and then by the end you're with someone new.
KH: No, no. It’s all mixed up. I’m into the traditional concept of the album. There are so many albums I love that are 45 minutes long that fit together in this amazing way. I hit a point with the record where I have various pieces of it and I can see how it can form together in a more perfect album, driven by the pacing of it. With Rounds especially, I remember being so happy at the end of it that it was a solid listen, beginning to end. When you got the end of it and you felt like it’d gone by a little quick. That felt good to me.
Pitchfork: Even post-Kid A, the trend at that time was still very IDM: Aphex Twin, Autechre. I remember Boards of Canada being the first ones to be like, "Here’s this music, but now it’s really warm and there’s emotion to it," whereas Aphex was so prolific.
KH: Yeah. I felt like Aphex would do things to wind people up almost. He’d have a very melancholic, beautiful sort of track followed by the most aggressive track he could make. Everything there would unsettle you. That was his whole thing.
But I was listening to Joni Mitchell and trying to make a record like Blue. And no one really seemed to understand my influences at all, which was frustrating. In the UK now, there’s hardly any magazines or anything, and nobody writes long pieces, but there was a lot of that stuff going on at this time. Once the "folktronica" tag was applied, it was a disaster for me. You’d have a magazine like Mojo come to me and-- rather than find out what the record was about-- they’d already decided, like, "We need a folktronica piece, maybe we can get two or three of the acts that we think fit into this mold and write about it." But they were writing about a scene that didn’t exist-- scenes come from the musicians, not from the magazine. So they’d choose a bunch of people who had no common connections at all and squash them together. Looking back now, I’m even more annoyed by it. Ultimately, it had an effect on the music I made afterward. It was like a direct rebellion against "folktronica." I had to move away from it.
Pitchfork: You either end up playing into their expectations or you break them and they despise you for breaking those expectations.
KH: Yeah. There were things where I kept trying to explain to everybody that Rodney Jerkins was the biggest influence on what I was doing with Rounds. Things like Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine”. He and Timbaland were like kings of pop music at that time, and these were the people I was looking to for all my guidance. Hip-hop was resonant for me. I never really cared about the MCs, though; it was always about the music. I’d want to know what record they sampled and I’d want to hear the original. I’d tell people this but they would still just write about Fairport Convention. And then Green Man Festival appeared, and one year I headlined-- the lineup was like Joanna Newsom, and then Smog, and then me. The crowd had been listening to acoustic music all day and by the time I came along, everyone wanted to dance.
Pitchfork: Was there an averse reaction to you playing the laptop?
KH: Oh yeah, I was getting a real hard time about that. But then once Prefuse 73 appeared, we did this tour together with Caribou, and it was cool. Everything got a lot of momentum very quickly. We all had very deep knowledge of hip-hop and samples. I met Diplo at the same time and he’d put out those AEIOU compilations, these psych rock compilations before he did Hollertronix. Funny enough, I saw Diplo at Coachella the other day and he introduced me into this dude RiFF RAFF, so it was us three hanging out for a minute. And straight away, Diplo was like, “You should do a beat for RiFF RAFF.” Not like we’re on the same spiritual path with music, but I was just like, “You know, I should send RiFF RAFF a beat.” It’s the most unlikely thing ever.
But Diplo originally was a sample nerd as well and he knew all those things inside-out. And then Stone’s Throw appeared and I met Egon and Madlib and all these people, and then very quickly there were a whole bunch of us who collect free jazz records and know all these breaks. We were traveling around on tour looking for records everywhere. Nobody realizes it, but Rounds is made only from records.
Pitchfork: Wait, what?
KH: It’s all samples, except for the electric guitar on the last track. Everything else is from vinyl bought on the road. I probably sampled 300 records to make it. Pause is all samples. Everything’s Ecstatic is all samples. They all are. But no one has ever caught on to that.
Pitchfork: I knew there was a Tori Amos sample on Rounds, which didn’t get cleared, but I never realized it was Avalanches-esque. Like when someone like Girl Talk puts out something now, there’s an entire Wikipedia page dissecting every single sample. How has that not happened with you?
KH: If you go on WhoSampled and you put Rounds in, there’s about two samples listed, because I was using the weirdest shit I had. Though I got caught for one of them, off of this Folkways record, Entourage Music and Theatre Ensemble. Everything got a bit heavy for a moment, and I was on tour in Baltimore and they asked if I could meet up. I remember the guy saying to me like, "You used my music without asking, and I lost money by getting the lawyer." And I was like, "You’ve just taken 100% of the publishing on this song away." We kind of called it quits. And then he came to the show and he said he loved everything I’d done with it on “She Moves She”.
Pitchfork: “As Serious as Your Life” name-checks the Valerie Wilmer book about free jazz in New York City in the late 60s and early 70s. Were you a big jazz fan at that time?
KH: I grew up listening to jazz because my dad was a big jazz fan. At home, I remember him playing things like Art Pepper, that mellow, beautiful kind of West Coast jazz. But then he’d take me to the Bracknell Jazz Festival and we’d go watch Don Cherry and Carla Bley. Then Soul Jazz put out this compilation, United Sounds of America, that was a massive turning point for me. It had Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra, Pharaoh Sanders, Steve Reid, all these things on it.
Pitchfork: And soon after, you moved more towards jazz, doing spontaneous improvisation and pushing the limits of what the laptop could do in a live setting.
KH: Totally. During Rounds, I started doing some of my big touring and then I really got interested in the jazz influence. I’ve got interest in the idea of improvising with live electronic music. And in 2001, Fennesz put out Endless Summer and Jim O’Rourke put out I’m Happy and I’m Singing and a 1, 2, 3, 4. That was a pivotal record for me. Here was someone into John Fahey and then he suddenly comes out with an improvised electronic laptop album. And it made total sense to me. The idea of live electronic improvisation of free jazz gave me all the direction for where I was going to go next. While touring Rounds, that’s what I was all about, doing it live, in real time, and making it louder and crazier-- that’s why I’ve got the live disc coming out with the reissue. And when I met Steve Reid it was like: “At last I have a chance to really do this.”
I was so into spiritual jazz. It was like music I’d dreamed had existed, like the greatest sound. I knew soul and R&B inside out, so hearing James Brown drums with mad jazz over the top was the absolute business for me. I would just come back to that music and see beyond everything else; it had an intensity and a driven compassion behind it. I called the track “As Serious as Your Life”, because my dad had given me the book and it was like a fun message to him. But I did hope that some kid would get interested and ask what the title was and then check out the book, so it's a bit like leaving little trails for people.
Pitchfork: You talked about this emotional aspect to Rounds and now that you’re making primarily dance tracks, are there still these little personal things that you feel like are expressions of you, even amidst a banging track?
KH: Oh, more than ever. After Rounds I never let go. That’s one of the reasons I’m still quite proud of Rounds: I put a lot of myself into it and I shouldn’t take that lightly at all. I mean, the last record is called Pink because I asked my daughter, “What should the record be called?” and she said, “Pink!”
A lot of the music I loved was so powerful to me because there was so much put in it. Around Everything Ecstatic, I was really interested in thinking about gospel music. Gospel isn’t some ditty to make people enjoy their afternoon-- it's communicating with God. So the idea of putting a lot of yourself into it and making it count means everything to me. The communal aspect of club music is quite a powerful thing. You try to make something that’s takes people as far away from earth as possible, something to be played in a very small room with all the lights off with the loudest sound you ever heard that makes you feel as weird as possible. That’s what I’m trying to achieve.