Send "Four Tet " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Kieran Hebden has always been singled out for his adventurous tastes and the way his disparate obsessions have been seamlessly melded into his own stylistically restless music. Hebden listened without prejudice, a value prized by both the post-rock and DJ communities he came out of at the tail end of the 1990s. Even as eclecticism took a beating in the early 2000s, with mash-up acts and bedroom DJs turning the whole idea into a one-note joke or a cheap way to get noticed, Hebden never shied away from mixing it all up, provided the whole felt greater than the trick of joining seemingly incompatible parts.Fabric has made a point of flagging Hebden's new mix for its sonic and conceptual unity. Certainly it does feel all of a piece compared to his last commercially released mix, a 2006 installment for the DJ-Kicks series that swerved from Akufen to Animal Collective. By contrast, Fabriclive 59 sticks pretty consistently to one scene. But it's a restless scene built on a premise of constant reinvention: UK garage, which from the late 1990s to the early 2000s mutated from a simultaneously roughed-up and opulent take on house music to the fierce and rap-derived clang-and-bang of grime. So already we've got the promise and surprise inherent in a famously eclectic selector bringing a freshness and fearlessness to music usually only spun by purist DJs sticking to music from within the scene. On that level, Hebden doesn't disappoint. For one thing, he includes ringers from way outside late-90s London, like Ricardo Villalobos. And despite their modern, weirdo-techno palette of sounds, these left-field inclusions fit perfectly with the vibe of the old-school tunes, especially the way someone like Villalobos treats his own heavily syncopated drums. As usual, it's to Hebden's credit as a DJ that he hears ways to join old and new that others might not....full text |
| Residentadvisor |
| Few club venues on this planet inspire more reverence from DJs than fabric: one need only review the testimonials from those who've helmed installments of the club's mix series to get a sense for how often a DJ has viewed his contribution as a chance to give something back to the place. Kieran Hebden, the man known as Four Tet, is no exception—in fact he's taken things a bit further: for his Fabriclive entry, a diverse, compelling tapestry of 2-step, house and broken beats, Hebden has woven in shreds of field recordings made of the club, on the street and down in its stylishly industrial bowels. This gives the mix a topographical quality, as if you're moving from Room One to Room Two to Room Three and back again, lost in a warren of dizzying bass pulses and echoing voices. Jazz music is often cited as a strong influence on Hebden's polyglot style—it's clearly there in the shuffling, pitched-down drums he favors. I'd argue that jazz has colored Hebden's mixing skills as well—you can find something akin to the syncopations of jazz rhythms in the nimble gait that Hebden adopts in skirting from one track to the next: see particularly the bold entrance that the aggressive beats from Youngstar's "Pulse X" make towards the end of KH's romantically moody "101112": they elbow their way to the front, the bass pound interrupting the last tune's shadowy make-out session. And check how "Angie's Fucked," a compelling oddity from 2001, explodes with a minor whirlwind of buzzing noises that sounds like a miniature rave happening on the inside of a dial-up modem, only to get swallowed in the spectral murk of Burial's "Street Halo." It's furthermore nice to see an artist like Four Tet adopt the challenge of restraining his versatility: don't forget that this is a guy whose DJ Kicks mix included Curtis Mayfield, Akufen and Animal Collective. Here Hebden's natural eclecticism is nicely tempered by the demands of the floor. The majority of Hebden's mix derives from garage and 2-step, those intertwined, predominantly turn-of-the-century UK subgenres that took junglist drum patterns and melted them down into spare, often haunting, R&B-laced tunes that while fairly speedy at 130-ish BPMs could still feel atmospheric and chilled out. The steps from 2-step to dubstep are fairly easy to follow considering how snug tunes from the late '90s like the white-label only Active Minds' "Hobson's Choice" sit here alongside more contemporary fare like STL's "Dark Energy."...full text |
| Bbc |
| The 59th edition of the FabricLive mix series might just be the most ‘live’ sounding of all, interspersed as it is with field recordings made at the London club. Hearing muffled drums and chattering voices is not unlike moving from room to room within Fabric’s cavernous interior. Even on its most eclectic nights, however, you might not be likely to hear grime following 30-year-old synthesizer experimentalism, or rare acid house twitching along beside even rarer stripped-down garage. Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet, casts this mix as being "about London and Fabric and nights out and my take on all that. The memories and the influences." It’s not, he stresses, "about my DJing." Just as well, as this is far from smooth as a mix. But flow is sacrificed with good reason. For straight-up genre DJs 75 minutes is long enough to craft a dynamic set. For those with wider tastes, however, the range of styles tends to need shrinking for coherence’s sake. But with the glut of mixes that are available for free online, Hebden is right to think that presenting a distinct musical vision is more valuable than getting the listener from start to finish with as few bumps as possible. It’s a decision that pretty much pays off, the result more a collage than a traditional mix. After the opening sounds of passing traffic and mumbling voices have faded away into the blissful electronic trickles of Michel Redolfi’s 1981 track Immersion Partielle, the mix eases into a mini-set of 2-step, grime and UK funky. Hebden’s been around long enough to plot accurate lines between past and present, so while tracks like Genius’ Waiting (1998), Apple’s Mr Bean (2007) and Floating Points’ Sais (dub) (2011) span more than a decade, there’s plenty of connective tissue linking one to another....full text |
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