Rounds

The year 2003 was a heady one for listening. On computers in the post-Napster landscape, guitar-rock intermingled with avant-garde classical music as well as “clicks’n’cuts,” which in turn could mix with twee indie rock and the thumps of backpack rap. After Kid A, analog components could fuck with guitars and laptops and soon a slew of new artists were pushing beyond these genre distinctions: DFA’s discopunk was already afoot, Jim O’Rourke had morphed from resplendent indie-pop fingerpicker to laptop noisenik, a producer from Florida named Diplo was mashing together heavy psychedelic rock breaks into something for rap heads, while underground hip-hop was getting strange and musty thanks to Madlib’s myriad personas.

The Class of 2003 also offered up three upcoming producers who embraced every sound on their hard drives and within one month that year, they all released their breakthrough efforts. There was Prefuse 73’s One Word Extinguisher, the soon-to-be-renamed-Caribou’s Up in Flames, and Four Tet's Rounds. The first melded IDM’s glitches to backpacker breaks while the second mashed it to psychedelic sunshine pop; Rounds, the third album for Kieran Hebden's project, grabbed at all of the above while also including jazz and folk. For the listeners out there who knew Hebden from his days in instrumental post-rock outfit Fridge and who might have considered his early recordings under the name of Four Tet as more of a side attraction than main gig, Rounds announced the arrival of one of electronic music’s vanguard producers.

The album opened with a recording of a dog’s heartbeat before Hebden lets it bloom into free meter drum rolls that evoked the amoebic pulses that defined late 60s experimental jazz before tightening it all up with a beat that headnodded at hip-hop without quite being beholden to it. That three distinct rhythms (cardiac, jazz, hip-hop) could effortlessly convene on “Hands” augured Hebden’s formidable beat skills, which even in the present tense pull from house, 2-step, Afrobeat, and dubstep while remaining singular.

It makes sense that Hebden so easily drew from multiple genres. As he revealed in a recent interview, Rounds was comprised entirely of samples. But that he draws from the most arcane source material available speaks to Hebden’s touch; on Rounds, his obscure sources serve the overall poignancy of the music. So while “She Moves She” retains the crisp snare and hi-hat work that underpinned millennial R&B productions, it’s the twinkling glockenspiel line that gives the track its emotional heft. Same for the harp line that intermingles with the iron lung beat of “My Angel Rocks Back and Forth.” Sampledelic or not, Four Tet’s music feels personal rather than patchwork.

The media catchphrase for mixing the pastoral airs of folk music with electronic music’s low-end became “folktronica,” a term Hebden detested and kicked against with each subsequent release. He embraced the fiery, brassy tones of spiritual jazz for his follow-up Everything Ecstatic and soon after began collaborating in earnest with free jazz drummer Steve Reid (while also producing for folk-jazz-noise-nonsense freewheelers Sunburned Hand of the Man). And when that generation-gap crossing collaboration ended with Reid’s passing in 2010, Hebden dove headfirst into modern dance music, taking in two-step, jungle, dubstep, techno and house, reconfiguring these heavier rhythms into something suiting his own manner. And as Pink recently showed, Four Tet’s knack for instantly-identifiable melody remains undiluted, no matter how strong and dancefloor-filling his new tracks are.

While touring for Rounds, Hebden began to slough off the “folk” tag of his live shows, pushing at the parameters of what a laptop could do onstage. The bonus disc on this 10th anniversary edition of Rounds reveals him at the height of his powers. Recorded live in Copenhagen, it finds Hebden taking the melodies and beanie-nodding rhythms of Rounds further and further out into the cosmos. “She Moves She” dilates from four to 10 minutes, with Hebden finding new pockets of space amid the string twangs and kick to add skittering samples and blurs of noise. A metallophone sample similarly gets rubberbanded-- at times resounding like a Balinese gamelan orchestra, other times flickering in even patterns like Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians-- before turning into “Spirit Fingers”.

The most astounding transformation occurs on “As Serious As Your Life”. The track’s taut drum break suddenly has Tibetan chimes, ghost notes, scraped strings, and electroacoustic gurgles mingle with its snare and hi-hat before the recognizable part of the song drops. But soon Hebden mutates it into a 15-minute monster that gobbles up every single genre tag in the process, until it’s a dervish of noise. As the original album proved and this reissue reinforces, Four Tet showed a new generation of listeners that much like 60s jazz before him-- which could embody soul, gospel, blues and primal howls while still sounding like “The New Thing”-- 21st century laptop music could be as serious as your life, too.