It’s another odd week; it feels as if January has just been odd weeks, each one with its own flavor of weirdness, either bemusing, confusing or patently overwhelming, so why should this one be any different, right? This particular week, so far, has been stuttering, stopping and starting in terms of energy and productivity, so it’s no surprise that I’ve had this song in my head for the last couple of days. Well… “song” feels like the wrong thing to write, in a way, because “song” for me feels as if it should have lyrics and singing, so… this is a tune, I guess? It’s the first Four Tet track proper that I listened to after countless times hearing a Four Tet remix of someone else’s music and thinking to myself, this is great, I should try and trac down more of this and utterly failing in my own plan. And, as an introduction to everything I like about Four Tet, it’s pretty much perfect; the mix of the organic and the digital sounds, the feel of an updated jazz sound – the simplicity of that guitar riff – that also somehow feels like some kind of comedown track you’d hear at the end of a Chemical Brothers album or something similar (especially at 1:27 in this video, where the bass and drums are suddenly looped much tighter, and become this wall of sound, or at 2:20, when the guitar appears again, reversed). But it also has the emptiness that makes me wish that Four Tet tracks had more of the emotionality and character of the tracks he’s remixed for other people; by the end of the track, you’re ready for it to be done, if that makes sense – The cleverness and playfulness has ceased to be a novelty, and you’re left wanting it to make one more evolution and turn into something that’s ultimately more interesting.
Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan