With his last album, the brilliant, beautiful and ever-blossoming Rounds, still on high rotation on my domestic jukebox, it was with much delight that I received this, the fourth offering from London laptop genius Kieran Hebden.
Found in your record shop filed under electronica, Four Tet is the work of a man whose consumption of music ranges from left-field hop hop and two-step garage to free jazz and obscure folk. With so many reference points, his own creations are rich in ideas and impossible to pin down – and never more so than in Everything Ecstatic.
The kind of album that one might expect from musicians on Mars, first single ‘Smile Around The Face’ is the ultimate extraterrestrial anthem. Ludicrously fun and bouncy with indecipherable Martian-like “vocals”, if this is alien pop then ‘Sun Drums And Soil’ is like entering an alien jazz club. The track opens with a frenzied drum solo – drums being a recurring focal point of the album – and meanders along with a series of twists and turns (bells, static and running water), before rising back in an almighty swell of big brass horns.
Next stop is a rooftop Zen garden in downtown Tokyo. A soothing cacophony of bells, chimes and flutes, ‘Clouding’ is what you’d expect if Aphex Twin tried his hand at New Age. The Far East flavour is present throughout – quite literally in the Hong Kong traffic lights samples of ‘Turtle Turtle Up’ and the ‘Fuji [Rock Festival sound] Check’ – and culminates in the beautiful chime-driven finale. Hebden, professing his love for spiritual music, said “I wanted to make a soulful record, something that attempted to communicate beyond this planet.”
Such is the ambitious, and thoroughly compelling, scale of Everything Ecstatic. Tune in to its complexities or chill out with the chimes – as Hebden says, “God is in the detail”.