Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Why Four Tet’s new album is called Three hasn’t been explained: the electronic musician, real name Kieran Hebden, seldom gives interviews. But the title appears to refer to a legal battle over streaming royalties with his former label, Domino Records, It removed three Four Tet albums from streaming services during the dispute. Hebden won the case in 2022 and the albums are back on the platforms — where they are joined by this latest release in his free-spirited career.
Three is his 12th studio album as Four Tet. The first came out in 1999 when he was also a guitarist in UK post-rock band Fridge. Now based in the US, he ranges through a vast world of sounds in his music. Acoustic instruments coexist with computers and synthesisers. You can hear koras, dulcimers, gamelans, improvised jazz, junglism and techno. They’re underpinned by Hebden’s holistic sense of everything connecting and his skill at making the links.
In recent years he has reinvented himself as an improbable superstar DJ in a mismatched buddy partnership with EDM top dog Skrillex and emo-electronica star Fred Again. Last year they played before an audience of 100,000 at Coachella. “It’s one of the most powerful feelings I’ve experienced in my whole life,” he said afterwards.
Unpredictable as ever, Hebden conveys none of that exhilaration on his new album, nor any triumph at his streaming victory. “Loved” gets us under way with relaxed hip-hop drums and the warm pulse of a keyboard melody. “Gliding Through Everything” is a gently mind-expanding exercise in New Age music. Just as matters threaten to get a bit too bubble bath and candles, the tempo picks up with “Daydream Repeat”. It combines a front-foot beat with a pastoral harp motif, which degrades into distortion before re-emerging with a trippy psychedelic echo.
“So Blue” is soft-hued melancholy with a sample of a woman trilling an emotive background melody as another leisurely hip-hop beat strikes up. “Three Drums” ends proceedings with a chill-out symphony that fades into ambient twinkling. Its title is a nudge too: here’s a musician who marches to the sound of his own drum.
★★★☆☆
‘Three’ is released by Text Records
This post was originally published on Financial Times
