There Is Love in You

Kieran Hebden first came on the scene in the 1990s as a member of Fridge, a post-rock outfit that to me always looked better on paper than they sounded on record. Whatever you think of his first band, Hebden's subsequent career can be seen as the idea of post-rock done right. His appetite for music, on the evidence presented in his albums, singles, DJ sets, and collaborations, is voracious. But Hebden has a way of transforming and integrating influences rather than channeling them. So if his loose improvised collaborations with drummer Steve Reid captured something of the spirit of the classic late-60s free jazz records on Impulse!, they also managed to carve out a unique and identifiable aesthetic that sounds very much like today. When working with others, like the wooly free-folk unit Sunburned Hand of the Man or the dubstep producer Burial, Hebden knows when to lead and when to get out of the way. But all the while, whatever the context, he's absorbing. And when it comes to his own records as Four Tet, he has a knack for combining sounds from all over and making them his own.

One thing that is unusual about Kieran Hebden's take on electronic music as Four Tet is that it really seems to dance. The music, I mean. A lot of modern dance music is vainly repetitive, brutally over-compressed, and driven by simplistic ideas of tension and release that remind me of the line graphs I used to draw in algebra class. There is something depressing about such mechanical precision, something fatalistic about a climax you can spot from a mile away. Having my senses overloaded is not a shortcut for being impressed. And I'm not saying I don't like Daft Punk, but it isn't enough for a song to hit me in the face with drum machines and overdriven pyrotechnics. Shock and awe doesn't cut it as a strategy for winning wars, and it isn't enough as a strategy for making music either. There is no reason that humans shouldn't be able to make dance music that reflects the sense of freedom and flexibility that you get from dancing, the sense you get from having a body and being able to move it.