Buzzin Music

Four Tet @ Village Underground photo: Daniel Hutchinson

Kieran Hebden aka Four Tet played a live set at the excellent Village Underground venue in East London on Sunday 30th May 2010 ably supported by a DJ set from Joe from Hot Chip and the emerging and talented Roska.

The club is an old brick walled Victorian basement with a high ceiling and full of sweating bodies ready to enjoy the undisputed English king of electronica.

As I’m waiting for the main event I look around at those gathered.  Some forty-somethings but mainly twenty-somethings made up of student types not yet able to grow goatee beards to scratch.  Standing next to me is a tall geeky looking white guy with a white man’s unkempt afro sporting a plain white long sleeved t-shirt, jeans and a rucksack; a typical look for a Four Tet gig.

Understated like his music, it was Kieran Hebden.  He asked the guy next to us if he was ready, removed his rucksack and walked through the crowdto a purpose-built plinth in the middle of the dance floor & immediately took centre-stage as he launched into his set with the heavenly Angel Echoes from his latest wonderful album, There Is Love In You.

Unlike the last time I saw Four Tet play, the audience were pretty motionless. Those in touching distance stared up as if in total awe of this genius as he twiddled nobs and flicked switches on two laptops and a mixer.

The set built evenly and included the tracks Love Cry and Circling from There Is Love In You; and by the time he finished his set with the perfect Sing everyone has loosened up and smiles and shapes were being thrown by everyone.  A net of coloured balloons fell from high over Kieran Hebden and for a time Four Tet led a merry dance like the Pied Piper of underground dance music.

With nowhere to go Hebden appeared a little awkward as he stepped off the makeshift stage soaking up the rapturous applause before stepping back in true rock n roll style for an encore he delivered an experiment in how fast could he play Spirit Fingers from the Rounds album and not lose the audience.  I personally dipped out at about 180bpm though others without facial hair appeared more in tune with the experiment which peaked somewhere near a Napalm Death onslaught.

Four Tet’s music amalgamates so many strands that you’re never quite sure what is going to happen.  But on this occasion it was the right choice for the set to be more upbeat than atmospheric and moody.

The crossover from mixing a track from behind a desk in darkness and a live spot-lit ‘performance’ where you feel compelled to stare at the artist is a strange one; and something that can be a complete damp squid – boring to watch but great to listen to (see The Chemical Brothers).  But Four Tet pulls it off.  To be honest, the set had several peaks and a few troughs for me personally, but the experience, the venue and the sound was spot on.

The gig followed the death of Steve Reid, Hebden’s close friend and collaborator who died in April after a long battle with cancer.