Chimpomatic

Four Tet

Remixes

The release of a new remix album hardly sends me running to the shops these days but when it has Kieran Hebdan aka Four Tet's name anywhere near it I tend to take more notice. Although not everything Four Tet has given us recently has quite matched the master works of his earlier albums he is still pretty consistent and always strives for integrity and quality. His recent collaboration with Jazz maestro Steve Reid shows the breadth of this man's musical appreciation and this collection of remixes hints at that breadth too. The first disc showcases Hebdan's reworking of artists like Aphex Twin, Bloc Party and Radiohead, while the second is the reverse and has remixes of Four Tet's back catalogue from the likes of Caribou, Battles and Boom Bip.

The first installment is the one that demands the most attention. Hebdan's remixes are far superior to anything that is made of his work and it really shows what he brings to this art form that along with the B- Side has been severely damaged by the MP3 culture. The difference between Four Tet's remixes and a lot of his competitors is that on hearing the rework you don't wish you were listening to the original. The best examples here are his take on Radiohead's Scatterbrain and Bonobo's Pick Up and each one really shows how his vision allows for the best parts of the original to remain while totally making the song his own. Two of the longest pieces here are his beautiful alteration of Rothko's Roads Become Rivers and the epic 11 minute version of Beth Orton's Carmella ...and they show that quantity does mean quality. He strips away the meat on Bloc Party's So Here We Are and provides a solid-as-hell backbone beat for Madvillian's Money Folder.

The second disc contains much of the failings of many remix albums and that is it's flow. Though many of the remixes are good it stops and starts and unlike the first disc does make me want to listen to a Four Tet album. He has such a distinctive style and tweaks his victims with a ramshackle of sampled noises, off kilter drum beats and trumpet squeaks and a grouping of his remixes really flows like one of his own albums.

Judging from his web site there is a mouth-watering array of artists about to get the Four Tet treatment like Archie Bronson Outfit and The Longcut. This heralds a bright future for the remix and many compilations of this quality to come.