Four Tet : Twenty Three

Four Tet is Kieran Hebdan, an electronic music artist who crafts ambient-feeling abstracts by melding basic beats with low-key instruments and concrete sounds, prefering to lace his tunes with acoustic guitar and clacking computer keyboards rather than bombastic synths. His works, at least on his early albums, are very relaxed but they refuse to fade into the background.

"Twenty Three" is off what I thought was his first album, but is actually his second. It's a pretty straightforward piece, kicking off with a variety of wind chimes. As the song progresses he adds in bits of sound, layering acoustic guitar, a chiming organ, a nice trumpet and a smooth backbeat. Plus there's the only vocal on the entire album which is just somebody going 'tok tok'. It serves as a rhythmic counterpoint to the beat, but the oddness of it, especially against the otherwise organic and flowing sounds, is really arresting. This juxtaposition is what pulls the piece up from a simple exercise in new wave environmental records to something interesting and worth hearing again and again. I think you could even toss it into mix for a dancefloor crowd.

The whole album is pretty good and is a pleasant listen to late in the evening. You can find "Twenty Three" on Kieran's post-debut album, 2001's Pause.

[You can listen to Four Tet's "Twenty Three" by navigating to the post "Song094" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

---