Laissez Four

Four Tet, aka Kieran Hebden, has released albums through London's hip über indie Domino Records, and picked up new fans from Radiohead's endorsement, but now he's going underground. This year the Brit IDM stalwart dropped his sixth album, Pink, independently with intentionally negligible promotion. Still, Hebden is touring globally, venturing to such exotic destinations as Romania. Next month he'll bring the Four Tet live show to these shores for his inaugural Meredith Music Festival with side-gigs in Melbourne and Sydney. “For me, coming to Australia is like the most exotic – it's as far away as I could possibly go,” Hebden enthuses. “I've got to travel all over through what I do, which is pretty amazing, really.”

Hebden formed the post-rock band Fridge while at Elliott School, the teen trio signing to Trevor Jackson's Output. Yet Fridge's sometime guitarist was soon attracted to electronica and began experimenting as Four Tet. Hebden presented his debut solo album, Dialogue, on Output in 1999 before switching to Domino for 2001's 'folktronica' Pause, his profile raised by a cred Aphex Twin remix, and then stunning critics with Rounds. Hebden took up DJing – and he's actually mixed compilations (the most recent FabricLive.59). He toured with Radiohead in 2003 and subsequently remixed their tunes, starting with Scatterbrain. He had a shot at production, bunkering down with Boston psychedelics Sunburned Hand Of The Man. More curiously, he co-composed the end credits music for the James Bond flick Quantum Of Solace. Nevertheless, Hebden is apparently proudest of his exchanges with the late American jazz drummer Steve Reid. Last year the versatile Londoner, a closet bass head, impressively snuck out the 12” Ego/Mirror with Thom Yorke and William “Burial” Bevan. “I went to school with Burial, so I've known him a long, long time. We're good friends. I really enjoy working with him – we work quite well together.” Spookily, other Elliott alumni include members of The xx, whose music Hebden has remixed.

Hebden released Pink, the follow-up to 2010's There Is Love In You, digitally on his Text Records (Japan got a CD) in August. Essentially, it's a collection of clubby singles he'd pressed on vinyl over the previous year. That Hebden has turned his back on Domino for an LP is a surprise, but he wanted “just to have a different experience”. “I was like, 'Okay, well, I wanna have a go at doing it myself now and see how that works out'. It feels nice to see the record there in the shops and know that I've done every element of it myself. It's there in a very pure state. Nobody else has come and put any of their influence to it, it's just been done my own unique way. I think nowadays it's very easy to communicate directly with people through social media and all that type of stuff, so it feels like an exciting time to be self-releasing records as well.” Pink's release wasn't merely DIY, it was laissez-faire – which is surely why Hebden doesn't sound stressed. “It's no work at all! I've done it in a very weird way. No promo copies of my record went out, there was no marketing of any sort done at all, the record was just put out… I've done about three interviews all year – and this is one of them. I just stopped doing everything conventional related to marketing music… People have responded really, really well to the music and they're encouraging and excited about the way I've released it. It feels very kind of simple and very honest and straight-ahead.”

Few may realise that Hebden has had his own label since 2001, its recordings infrequent. “It existed more just as an outlet for certain things that I didn't have a label for, or [that] I wasn't sure what I was gonna do with.” However, when it came to disseminating Pink, Hebden was pleased that this infrastructure was established. He now means to focus more on Text, with up to five issues a year – though they'll mainly be 12”s. “I'm not gonna employ anybody or get an office or anything like that.” Nor is Hebden looking to recruit acts, Text sticking with projects in which he's involved. Hebden lately put out a second album by Chicago singer-songwriter One Little Plane (aka Kathryn Bint) that he produced called Into The Trees. Come the new year, he'll air tracks cut with London band RocketNumberNine. Above all, Text won't become a powerhouse. “I'm definitely not hanging around at SXSW with a chequebook thinking like, 'Okay, I've gotta find a hot new act ready for the label',” Hebden quips.

The one convention Hebden is reluctant to abandon is the album, even as many electronic types are privileging singles or EPs. He is attached to the format and reasons that listeners have often discovered him that way. Is the album relevant, then? “It's relevant for me because a lot of the music I love the most is in that format, especially old – like I listen to a lot more old music than new music, I think. I'm putting on records from the '60s and '70s all the time, and the album format is so well crafted around then. When I make music I kind of want to be part of that history a lot of the time. The idea of being able to make a record that can sit on the shelf next to my Jimi Hendrix record or whatever, that seems important to me.”

While Hebden is broadly classified as IDM, his sound is nebulous, with flakes of jazz, folk, hip hop, kosmische, house, techno and, latterly, post-dubstep. He continually challenges himself. “I just try to keep stuff always moving on and changing,” He ponders. “I don't wanna get stuck anywhere. I want it always to be evolving and changing somehow… Who knows what the next record will sound like? But I just hope that what I do keeps moving on. It's definitely not gonna sound like the one that just came out.” He's aiming to spend time in the studio next year. 

Kanye West teamed with Glasgow glitch-hopper Hudson Mohawke for GOOD Music's Cruel Summer, which Hebden considers a “brilliant” manoeuvre. It's not impossible to imagine him, with his Radiohead affiliations, doing something similar. And he wouldn't be against to the proposition, providing it's “a true collaboration” and not “forced”. “I don't care how big they are,” Hebden says of potential partners. “I'm totally up for it. I'm open to all sorts of things. But I'm not pursuing stuff like that, ever. I like to just bump into people on my travels and see what happens.”

Hebden's Meredith show will be loosely based around Pink, being “more improvised” and “a bit more abstract”. “I don't really plan it too much. There's no planned set lists or anything like that. I very much like to make up a lot of what I'm doing there and then in the moment.” Crucially, it'll also be more 'dancey'. “The material I've got at the moment is probably a bit more techno-y and more pumped-up than the stuff in the past so, especially at festivals, it's been working really well.”