Four Tet doesn’t think like most producers — luckily for us. And the experimental jazz and electronic genius, who digs Shakira as much as he does Aphex Twin and Todd Edwards, has just made his first full-on dance record. DJmag meets him…


It’s no great surprise that when Kieran Hebden comes into the cafe to meet DJmag, he’s clutching a thick wedge of vinyl in a bag from eminent London music emporium Sounds Of The Universe. Among the haul there’s Honest Jon’s latest double-vinyl collection of Afro-Latin rhythms and the grammatical nightmare that is ‘BRKLN CLLN’, the new 12” from dubstep wunderkind Joy Orbison.


As Four Tet, Hebden’s musical points of reference are intimidatingly sprawling — free jazz, hip-hop, leftfield electronica, krautrock, weird European library music, musique concrete, house, techno, grime, UK garage, two-step, dubstep. It’s probably the only way his music could sound the way it does. But he’s always had a problem with pigeonholes. Long saddled with the nebulous and arguably misleading label of ‘folktronica’, he’s poised to smash such genre fascism with a wrecking ball. “People ask me about the music industry and how it’s supposed to be dying,” he says, leafing carefully through his purchases. “I’m keeping it alive! I’m in the shops every week. In 90% of music interviews, people get asked what they think about downloading. I’m sure loads of people say they’re really worried about people downloading their stuff, but they’ve probably not bought a record in the past three years or something. If people are so worried about it, they should maybe go out and buy a record.”


So you’re either part of the solution or part of the problem. It’s a good point. Hebden is full of them, it turns out. He’s definitely bright anyway. He looks like a bit of an egghead, in the politest way possible of course, with a shock of curly hair and an intense, deep-set gaze. You only have to listen to Four Tet compositions to know that this is most likely the case. His music is layered and complex but without ever feeling impenetrable. It’s a tightrope walk, but one that he has mastered, from his debut ‘Dialogue’, on Trevor Jackson’s Output Recordings (Jackson also signed Hebden’s first band Fridge when he was still a teenager), to the critically lauded ‘Pause’ and ‘Rounds’, both released on Domino, his label home since 2001.


His last album, 2005’s ‘Everything Ecstatic’, was a reaction to the ineffectual; to music without meaning. “It was kind of full throttle. I was finding much music to be very bland. I was missing that thing of people reaching true intensity, like what happens in a really passionate free jazz record or a gospel record, people performing because they think they’re communicating with god through their music, instead of people writing songs thinking, ‘This is pretty, I don’t know what it means, maybe it’ll get on an advert’. “That seemed to be more the mentality of what had happened. People used to use music as the most powerful force.”