Fridge and Four Tet

Four Tet, Hebden's all-instrumental solo project, debuted with the single Thirtysix Twentyfive (1998), an encyclopedic 36-minute piece comprising a geometric Canterbury-style meditation (a` la Soft Machine or Nucleus), a looping collage of digital noise and beats, an ambient blend of atmospheric guitar tones, tinkling metallic percussion and romantic trumpet, a sudden burst of melodic energy and a coda of found sounds.

The album Dialogue (Output, 1999) capitalized on the idea of electronic ethnic-jazz fusion. The result is certainly elegant, as proven by the smooth ambient jazz-rock of The Space Of Two Weeks and by the sleepy seven-minute Calamine, that calmly displays its syncopated beats and flute calls, but rarely inebriating. The frigidness is rarely challenged. Chiming keyboards, moaning horns and pulsing bass lines barely scratch the surface of Chiron. A bit of percussion frenzy appears in The Butterfly Effect, but it destroys whatever else was in the mix, precisely because the core music of Four Tet tends to be so fragile. There are two pieces that consist of contradictory flows: 3.3 Degrees From The Pole, basically a cacophonous overlap of an African bacchanal and a free-jazz jam, and Aying, a contrast of Middle-Eastern violins and free horns. The ten-minute Fume combines sections of incandescent jamming and sections of looped ambience, both spiced with haunting digital sound effects.

Four Tet's Pause (2000) was a better focused and more accessible manifesto of digital folk music than Four Tet's debut. In Glue Of The World delicate guitar melodies intersect syncopated jazzy beats and background noise. After the intrusion of atonal harp-like sounds, the beat mutates into a swampy texture and the melody reappeares with a music-box quality. Minimalist repetition leads the piece to its illogical conclusion. It sounds like This Heat jamming with Mike Oldfield and being remixed by DJ Shadow. Twenty Three is introduced by a guitar motif as frantic metallic percussion blends with the digital beats. A melancholy trumpet melody soars as the guitar recedes. The Eastern influence surfaces in the koto-like aria of Parks, the most "ambient" piece. Harp variations populate the void of Untangle that is scoured by a metronomic beat.
If the first half of the album is sleepy and subdued, the second half wakes up to the drum'n'bass eloquence and quasi-bluegrass guitar of Everything is Alright. No More Mosquitoes is basically a novelty: a child's singalong against a robotic rhythm, aquatic noises and Eastern-tinged strumming. Hilarious Movie Of The 90's toys with the most memorable carillon of the album, a simply melody that is never quite itself but could obviously be catchy if only Hebden wanted it. The minimalist repetition of a harpsichord-like fugue sets the brisk rhythm of the seven-minute You Could Ruin My Day. When the drums finally kick in, the guitar replaces the harpsichord, so that the second part sounds like a (soulful, bouncy) remix of the first part. In fact, all of these compositions sound like remixes of themselves, or, better, remixes of remixes of remixes of... remixes of themselves. Four Tet introduced the art of the permanent remix.

Four Tet's Rounds (Domino, 2003), a more abstract exercise in layering contrasting patterns over unassuming melodies and disappearing rhythms, runs the gamut from one extreme to the other of the spectrum. Hands is a cubistic recombination of rhythmic and melodic elements to the point that there is no recognizable rhythm or melody, just a very tender chaos; while And They All Looked Broken Hearted is spectral jazz-rock for koto; and the nine-minute Unspoken is a series of variations over a melancholy piano ballad. There is, in general, a more vibrant approach, that peaks with the most ebullient pieces: Spirit Fingers, built around cascading toy-like sounds, and the funky As Serious as Your Life. Only the fractured carillon of She Moves She, the lively lullaby My Angel Rocks Back And Forth, permeated with neoclassical echoes, and Slow Jam, reminiscent of Robert Wyatt's pathos and of John Cale's viola drones in the Velvet Underground, continue the "folktronica" of the previous album.
Four Tet had invented a new form of music, one in which minimalism (a very simple and brief melodic fragment is repeated over and over again...) and soundsculpting (...thus the "song" is in the arrangement not in the melody) are one and the same, while digital beats and textures coexist with emotional, personal and intimate art.

In the meantime, Fridge's Eph (Go Beat, 1999 - Temporary Residence, 2002) mirrored Four Tet's experiments in a set of evocative melodies. The delicate guitar movement that emerges from the intense rhythmic activity of Ark leads to a complex clockwork of polyrhythms and drones. Initially, Of sounds like a metaphor for the difficulty in communicating, as distant drumming, assorted percussion, indifferent bass lines and ghostly electronics refuse to interact with each other; but then the electronic organ intones a simple melody that brings everything together. Bad Ischl is a slow march towards a solemn polyphony of guitar, saxophone, violin, electronics and rhythm section, almost a variant on Steve Reich's method of gradual composition. The standout Aphelion capitalizes on these techniques and delivers a dense looping form of ambient music that incorporates dissonance, drumming and sitar as it approaches the moment when the strings rise above the orchestra and wrap the crowded scene in a gentle tide of wails.

Early Output 1996-1998 (Temporary Residence, 2009) collects Fridge's pre-Eph singles and EPs.

Fridge's Happiness (Temporary Residence, 2001) mostly employed minimal dynamics for the purpose of creative song-sculpting. Melodica And Trombone challenged the rules of both chamber music and free jazz, flirting with both forms while layering chaotic percussions and organ drones. A simplified version of this idea is offered by Tone Guitar And Drum Noise, in which a melancholy harmonica melody floats over a stormy sea of percussion. Harkening back to Latin-jazz and minimalist repetition, the 13-minute Drum Machine And Glockenspiels achieved another elegant synthesis. The impression that this is music largely crafted by the rhythm section is increased by Drums Bass Sonics And Edits, whose "sonics and edits" seem to play the role of additional percussion. Less enthralling are instead the two guitar shuffles, nine minutes each: Five Four Child Voice and Long Singing. The title of most magic creation goes to the ten-minute closer, Five Combs, that reverses the relative weight of rhythm and arrangement, with the piano and the (sampled) voice driving the piece to its textural climax in a manner that recalls Robert Ashley's operas.

Fridge's Adem Ilhan released the solo Homesongs (Domino, 2004), a collection of humble bedroom folk-songs that reverberate with the lullabies of Donovan and Leonard Cohen, and compete with those of Sufjan Stevens. Love And Other Planets (2006), however, was mostly a bad imitation of Rufus Wainwright's pop, and Takes (2008) opted for covers.

Kieran Hebden's fourth Four Tet album, Everything Ecstatic (Domino, 2005) marked a turn away from ecstasy and towards tension, as the sound abandoned its gentler side and opted for a darker and heavier edge. Turbulence of a higher sort permeates pretty much every track. The jumping bass lines and clattering cymbals of A Joy escalate to a wall of jarring noise. The industrial dance of High Fives enjoys juxtaposing the celestian tinkling of metallic percussion and some brutal scratching. The quasi-comic minimalist repetition of android synth chirping gets wiped out by a panzer rhythm in Sleep Eat Food Have Visions.
These pieces have to fight with their own nature in order to establish their identity. The music sounds out of control, as if technology finally overran the composer.
Compard with the past, Hebden is relying less on loops because he has mastered a technique of metamorphoses. The digital ballet of Smile Around the Face repeats itself over and over again, but spinning always different nuances. The music flows smoothly. Sun Drums And Soil performs magic, first by unleashing exuberant jazz-psychedelic electronic dance music and then by self-imploding into chaos and cacophony.
The closest thing to a song (and the most obvious departure from the Four Tet canon) is And Then Patterns, whose background noise and steady beats pivot around a distorted pastoral melody and the tender counterpoint of a vibraphone.
Perhaps the relaxed ambient closer You Were There With Me that closes the album is meant as a harbinger of better times.

Four Tet's double-CD Everything Ecstatic - Films & Part 2 (Domino, 2006) is a rip-off that contains some awful films, some remixes and some leftovers.

Electronic musician Kieran Hebden and jazz drummer Steve Reid recorded two volumes of Exchange Session (Domino, 2006), a hypnotic serving of extended jams of electronic free-jazz. Tongues (Domino, 2007), instead, opted for a more concise format of ten short duets. NYC (2008) was a trivial compromise.

Kieren Hebden, Adem Ihan and Sam Jeffers reformed Fridge to record The Sun (Temporary Residence, 2007), another diligent manual of post-rock lacking moments of real excitement.

Four Tet's four-song EP Ringer (Domino, 2008) is devoted to the hypnotic repetitive patterns of Detroit's techno dance music.

There Is Love In You (Domino, 2010) is a collection of elegant ideas that are mostly inspired by and built around treated female vocals. The multi-layered approach of Everything Ecstatic is applied with varied results to Angel Echoes, that deconstructs house music, Plastic People, whose dance trance sounds even pastoral and spiritual, especially when the children's choir emerges from the haze of tribal stupor, and the disco single Love Cry, an exuberant series of variations on intergalactic signals that peaks when the rhythm is enhanced by thumping bass lines.
Another front opens with Circling, a Terry Riley-ian minimalist concerto of cascading synth tones. This technique is put to work in the polyrhythmic techno feast Sing, a symphony of bubbling synth tones and female wails against a thumping beat. Hence the bouncing and fluttering polychromatic backdrop to the folkish melody of This Unfolds, which stands as the hippie counterpart to the rave-oriented Love Cry. This album marked the conversion of Four Tet to dance music. His music had incorporated beats from the very beginning but mostly used them as textural elements. Here their role is definitely propulsive.

Four Tet's Fabriclive 59 (2011) is a mediocre mixtape.

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