Fridge is the post-rock project of English multi-instrumentalist Kieran Hebden
(also active as Four Tet).
Ceefax (Output, 1997), with Robots In Disguise,
Semaphore (Output, 1998), with the repetitive Lo-fat Diet and the
swinging There Is No Try,
and the singles collected on Seven's and Twelve's (Output, 1998)
presented a diligent disciple of
Tortoise.
Fridge was usually the trio of
Kieren Hebden, Adem Ihan (also active as Adem) and Sam Jeffers.
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 also released the 38-minute 0181 (2013),
a collection of rarities recorded from between 1997 and 2001, between the
first and second album.
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.
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.
Hebden convented to electronic dance music with
Four Tet's four-song EP Ringer (Domino, 2008), which is devoted to
the hypnotic repetitive patterns of Detroit's techno dance music.
In fact, There Is Love In You (Domino, 2010)
is a collection of elegant ideas for the dancefloor
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 (Fabric, 2011) is a mediocre mixtape.
Hebden's and Reid's Live at the South Bank (2011) documents Reid just
before he died in 2010.
Pink (Hostess Entertainment Unlimited, 2012) collects
Four Tet dance singles and two new pieces.
This is mostly trivial techno and house.
The eight-minute Locked boasts an angelic guitar solo that pops up
every now and then over a bubbling texture and an intricate beat, and
the eight-minute Pinnacles (the standout) is a lively jungle-flavored
funk-jazz jam littered with neurotic piano and guitar sounds.
But the nine-minute Lion (a new piece) is a mechanical repetition
of a 2-step beat that any teenager can realize, and the
eight-minute Pyramid feels like an amateurish implementation
of house-music stereotypes.
The eleven-minute Peace For Earth (the other new piece) is a
pulsing slab of chill-out ambient house performed on vintage electronic
keyboards: it would be a bonus track on most albums of electronic dance
music, but here it's the second standout.
Beautiful Rewind (Text, 2013) confirmed that
Four Tet's shift towards the dancefloor was not only episodic, and in fact
codified in de-facto
manifestos such as
Gong, with its unlikely blend of 160-bpm jungle drumming and psychedelic gamelan,
and Kool FM, that tried to bridge two eras of electronic dancing (grime and drum'n'bass).
The best result of his reinterpretation of drum'n'bass comes in the
cubistic cha-cha ballet for ensemble of clockworks Aerial.
There is however an alter-ego at work, an alter-ego who is more interested
in generating trance via Brian Eno-esque compositions:
the cryptic vignette Crush,
the broken carillon of Ba Teaches Yoga,
the minimalist saxophone of Your Body Feels,
and the anemic pulsation of Parallel Jalebi that seems about to die
at every beat.
These Eno-esque tracks are the ones that benefit the most from
Hebden's newly found passion for sparkling synthesizer tones.
If the dance record fails, this impressionistic record at least gives hope.
Morning / Evening (Text, 2015) contains two lengthy Four Tet pieces,
the first time that Hebden has opted for that format.
Morning Side (20:24) opens with a sleepy two-step rhythm over which Hebden lays an even more sleepy sample of Lata Mangeshkar's Hindi-language song Main Teri Chhoti Behana Hoon (from the soundtrack of Sawan Kumar Tak's 1983 film Souten).
Needless to say, the song feels like a trance-y psychedelic soundtrack, as the vocal tracks slowly dissipates into a mellow viscous lake of arpeggiated synths.
For 12 minutes Evening Side (19:53) indulges in meditative new-age music for floating tinkling synths, reverbed drones and muffled female humming, but then plunges into a weird coda of chugging industrial beats.
These juggernauts, that basically extend the intuitions of
the Brian Eno-esque compositions on the previous album,
don't amount to much in the world of ambient music
but explore the genre from a novel perspective.
Hebden opted for the serene trance Evening as the fundamental mode
of Four Tet's New Energy (Text, 2017), but a trance this time
coupled with small miracles of audio engineering.
The best example is the way he combines the
three elements that support each other in
Two Thousand and Seventeen: a
drowsy industrial beat, a solemn funereal organ drone,
and a strong melody played by a zither-like instrument that
sounds like played by a vintage clock's escapement.
The seven-minute Planet deserves a standing ovation too for the way it grafts drowsy female vocals onto a robotic garage beat in a landscape of bubbling pastoral synthesizers and droning psychedelic explosions while stringed instruments strum a Mediterranean melody at an extremely slow pace.
The eight-minute SW9 9SL starts with a slow-motion cycle of weak beats but keeps reshaping them until they grow into a similar nostalgic lullaby and then morphs them into an ominous zombie dance with funk-jazz organ notes.
The way Scientists metabolizes its distorted elongated female laments is no less sophisticated, worthy of Monet's impressionism.
Meanwhile, abstract surrealistic vignettes like LA Trance, Memories and You Are Loved sound more like Aphex Twin than Four Tet.
There is very little energy to be found on New Energy but there is
definitely a new kind of energy.
Possibly his best album since Rounds (2003).
Four Tet's Sixteen Oceans (2020) is instead a shameful approximation
of music, a hodgepodge of trivial ideas of
ambient, microhouse and synth-pop (the single Teenage Birdsong).
Not only trivial but also monotonous.
Parallel (2020) contains the 26-minute ambient composition
Parallel 1 for synth drones and found sounds (not exactly groundbreaking) and nine shorter untitled downtempo pieces.
In between these two albums Hebden also released
871 (2020), containing archival material,
and an EP under his Indecipherable Wingdings moniker.
