Tet Offensive

One idle morning last November, Kieran Hebden decided it was time for a new Four Tet album. He turned on his computer, got to work and before the last of the Christmas turkey had been eaten, Everything Ecstatic was complete.

"I did the album in two months and that was intentional," explains Hebden. "I wanted to make a record really, really quickly to try to get an energetic, sort of tense sound to it. So that it wouldn't have time to calm down in any way."

With the exception of a few very Zen-like chime and bell compositions, Everything Ecstatic is a much wilder ride than its 2003 predecessor, the widely acclaimed Rounds.

"It's important to me that all the records develop quite a lot, and that I don’t just repeat ideas again and again," says Hebden. "I wanted to make a much more kind of outgoing record, something that had a strong message to it and was almost shouting itself at people, rather than making a record that was all about hiding away in your bedroom and listening to it alone."

The same thing cannot be said for the album's creation. Made entirely on a desktop computer in his London apartment, one of the core ideas behind Four Tet (as opposed to Hebden's other musical pursuits) is that "everything that happens is humanly impossible".

Hence the presence of alien-like singing (sped up vocals), crazed drum solos (a combination of drum machine sequences and samples from Hebden's extensive jazz collection) and Hong Kong traffic crossing lights, recorded during a tour stopover ("They're quite mental… sort of techno-sounding," laughs Hebden).

Yet for all the seemingly infinite layers of complexity in Everything Ecstatic, Hebden has retained his less-is-more approach to technology.

"For me, the most important thing are the ideas," he explains. "I use whatever I need to use to realize the ideas - rather than having tons and tons of equipment that I spend all my time learning how to use, then think about what music I want to make."

Such is the simple, genuinely passionate, and almost effortless way in which Hebden has approached his vocation to music. With no formal training and a degree in Maths and Computer Science to his name, Hebden has worked his way into almost every sphere of the music industry – as musician, producer and label owner - simply by learning on the job.

"I just believe in going for it," Hebden shrugs. "I don't worry or practice anything. Every job I get offered, even I've usually never done anything like that before, I'll be like, 'Yeah, OK then'. I think that's the best way to learn. Just do it."

Looking at the biography that accompanies Everything Ecstatic – straightforward, more like a resume than the usual rambling narrative of influences, epiphanies and other "favourite breakfast food" miscellany - it's astounding to see how much Hebden has managed to fit into the years since "1977: Kieran born" and the next entry on the timeline, "1993: Kieran formed his first band Fridge with school friends Adem Ilhan and Sam Jeffers".

"It's funny how every time you do an album a new biography gets written," says Hebden thoughtfully. "When stuff like that is put together it's always the first time when I can see, down on paper, an outline of all the stuff I've been doing. I always realize the quantity of records that come out and the tours that I've done."

In addition to four "solo" albums as Four Tet, Hebden has released another four with on-off post-rock band Fridge, produced albums for Beth Orton and James Yorkston, and remixed the work of such diverse artists as Aphex Twin, Badly Drawn Boy, David Holmes, Radiohead, Cinematic Orchestra and Super Furry Animals (to name a handful). And then there's the Frequent Flier Points he's clocked up on with the many high-profile support tours he's been invited to play. To say that Hebden is sought-after in music circles is a gross understatement.

"I love the whole world of music," he says by way of modest explanation. "It's always been my intention to get very involved and interact with other musicians and tour and make records and produce and do all these various things, and they all kind of build on each other. You do one job and another musician hears what you did and asks you to work with them."

But doesn't he ever marvel at how far he's come by "learning on the job"?

"All the time I stop and think, 'Wow, how good's this?' I do think I have a really, really amazing life!" he enthuses. "I get excited all the time that I'm managing to do it and I just think I mustn't slow down. I've got to carry on. With my last album Rounds I hit a much wider audience and obviously sold a lot more records, so it was really exciting when I was making this album [Everything Ecstatic] that a lot of people were definitely going to check it out or give it some kind of attention."

"It's obviously more scary as well, knowing loads of people are going to hear it," he adds. "But essentially it made me feel quite good that I could get on with it and people were going to give me the time of day. That was a really nice feeling."

Perhaps the biggest coup for Kieran Hebden, certainly as far as he's concerned, has been a recent collaboration with legendary jazz and funk drummer Steve Reid.

"It's an idea I'd had for a long, long time to work with a drummer doing duo improvisations - drums and electronics – and we did shows in Paris and London in March," he explains.

"A friend of mine set it all up and when I met Steve we instantly got on. He seems to really understand my music. It was just really exciting because he's such an amazing musician – he's played with James Brown and Sun Ra and Fela Kuti, and he played on old Motown records and stuff."

"There's a rhythmic element of my music…" he trails off. "I feel like there's this level of rhythm that I'm always reaching for that's essentially out of my reach, this real tradition of African American drumming that's come through soul and funk and hip hop, that being a middle class guy from London, it's just not really in me to have! And Steve's the epitome of that. He's done it all and been involved in all those types of music and that's what he does. To have him come and bring that element to my music in bucketloads like that, and for us to work together, was really, really exciting."

Hebden approached the live performances in with his customary throwing-himself-in-the-deep-end composure.

"I wanted to do something that was in the tradition of those free jazz duos and one of the ideas behind it is that there's no rehearsals and no discussions beforehand. It's just a very musical communication," he explains. "It was terrifying doing that but I knew that was the way it had to be."

So inspiring were the improvised performances that Hebden and Reid decided to take their "musical communication" to another level.

"We've gone into the studio and made an album since then," reveals Hebden. "We hired out a studio that had all this old analogue equipment and we used lots of old microphones from the 50s all recorded it all onto tape."

The album, which will be released through Domino Records, is comprised of two volumes. "We've separated it into two halves and each one has three long tracks on it. It's not going to come out until early next year, I think, but that’s my next step after this."

"This" being the promotional tour of duty for the new album, Everything Ecstatic. While there are no Irish dates planned for the time being, Hebden gives an outline of the live Four Tet experience.

"In a live context, it's just me and the computers. One of the ideas behind my music is that everything that happens is kind of humanly impossible, and getting humans to try to recreate parts of it would be some kind of step back. Which is why working with other musicians, and especially the project with Steve Reid, is really interesting to me because it's taking the music somewhere else. The stuff I do myself, it's going to be just me really."

With so much on his plate and a seemingly endless appetite for all things sonic, I ask Hebden if there's any type of music he doesn't like.

"I don’t like opera," he fires back. "I can't get with it at all. The voices are freakily painful to hear a lot of the time and the classical music frustrates me intensely. It's the combination of these wailing voices and complex classical music."

At least we know there's one thing that will never appear on the Kieran Hebden biography!

Four Tet's new album Everything Ecstatic is out now on Domino Records.