Four Tet previews new material, remixes

After last week's post about Four Tet's upcoming new album and remix EP, Hebden himself made an appearance on Gilles Peterson's Radio 1 show this week to preview a new track, 'Plastic People' and Joy Orbison's remix of 'Love Cry'.

'Plastic People', a reference to his residency at the club of the same name, is of the same ilk as 'Love Cry', a gradually building and shifting 4/4 overlaid with certain Four Tet trademarks - loose-limbed, organic percussion and delicate chimes. It's also quite wonderful, playing a distinctly garagey beat that could have some straight from his collaborative work with Burial against looped diva vocals and the all-encompassing synth wash that he shares with Joy Orbison.

Chatting to Peterson, he revealed that his new record was largely influenced by his DJ residencies at The End and Plastic People, and "just changing the tempo of my music to a more house type of tempo... the combination of that and the DJing has been the biggest influence on the new record for sure".

Joy Orbison's 'Love Cry' takes the original's vocal stutter and runs with it, setting the entire thing to the same balance of euphoria and melancholy that made 'Hyph Mngo' so addictive, and manages to out-class the already brilliant original.



Roska's also put a snippet of his 'Love Cry' remix up on his Myspace - it's as expected from Roska, complete with his trademark cocky namecheck vocal sample. Both mixes are due out on a 12" in the next couple of weeks.

New Four Tet album!

I watched Kieran Hebden DJ in Bristol this weekend. It certainly wasn't the slowed down techno pulse I'd expected from previous outings and his regular appearances at Border Community nights in the past. Instead his two hour or so period on the decks jumped stylistically from the swirling minimalism of his hypnotic 'Ringer' - a track which comes to life in a club like no other - to shuffling funky from the likes of Roska and Hard House Banton and a sudden, oh-so-right emergence of So Solid Crew's 'Oh No'. From the sounds of it, he's been absorbing and processing a host of welcome influences - his new 12" 'Love Cry', released last week with the minimum of fanfare, climaxes with a chorus of chopped female vocals and stuttering bass straight out of a UK funky track.



Today FACT have gone one better and confirmed that connection further - Hebden's new Four Tet album is to be released on January 25th. Entitled There Is Love In You, it will be preceded by a remix 12" later this month from none other than Roska and Joy Orbison. This is going to be big. Four Tet's recent work has been uniformly stunning - expect no difference here. Also, nice picture.

http://www.fourtet.net