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.]

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Daft Punk : Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

So, if you listened to the radio at all in 2007, you heard Kanye West's smash "Stronger". It was a decent rap over a killer vocoder-driven vocal track shouting "harder, better, faster, stronger". "How cool! What a genius!" you probably thought to yourself, at least if you're as square as I am. Well, he is a genius, but mostly a genius at picking out cool but obscure samples.

"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" is a jam by French electronic duo Daft Punk. It's an exceptionally  funky tune that takes a simple self-empowering chant, wraps it in vocoder splendor and splays it over groove in a most jazzy way. The vocoder is a device that breaks sound, particularly speech, down into composite wave forms. These are then transmitted and decoded resulting in a decidedly robotic tone.
In this case, the tone is also being warped by incredible keyboard work by the duo. In a sense, the vocals are the keyboard sound, not in a digital sampling sense, but in a very analog sense. Listen to the syncopated funk as they chop the lyrics up around 2:20 or the near incomprehensible squeaks in the final solo around the 3:20 mark. I just love the way they break it down, with the vocals becoming less vocal-like and more mechanically instrumental as the song progresses.

Meanwhile, the hook jams underneath, pumping the funk and holding down a solid base for the duo to vamp over. It's like jazz-funk from the '70's that's been shipped via time machine to the new millennium.

You can find "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" on Daft Punk's 2001 release, Discovery. While this song is an amazing tune, and when it's on, it's hard to argue that it's not my favorite tune of all time (the groove is just that good), the rest of the album is more pedestrian dance. There are people who love Daft Punk, but alas, I am not one of them. Except this song. This song is awesome.

[You can listen to Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" by navigating to the post "Song091" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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