(2019) Four Tet - Live at Alexandra Palace, London 8th and 9th May 2019
Review:
The British producer Kieran Hebden has one of the most distinctive signatures in electronic music. First, a gravelly drum machine; then, some jewel-toned synth pads; and, finally, a strip of harp or chimes or wordless cooing, unspooling like wrinkled ribbon. Hebden gets plenty of mileage out of this trim set of sounds, and Live at Alexandra Palace, London 8th and 9th May 2019 makes for a good display of his range. Drawing mostly from 2017’s New Energy and 2013’s Beautiful Rewind, he fuses everything into nearly two hours of surging buildups, placid comedowns, and hard lefts. The album shows just how dynamic his modest toolkit can be—and proves, by extension, that he is a stellar performer, not just a producer. Last year’s Live at Funkhaus Berlin, 10th May 2018 was Four Tet’s first official live album in 14 years (on Bandcamp and on a clandestine Spotify page, he has since added archival live recordings dating from 2004, 2010, and 2013). The Funkhaus show wasn’t as radically improvisational as his live shows once were; instead, it offered a medley of catalog favorites. Live at Alexandra Palace follows almost the same setlist as the Funkhaus, but the crescendos are more forceful, the moments of chaos more tumultuous, the transitions more drawn out. Alexandra Palace does away with song titles, with tracks named simply “Part 1” through “Part 5,” an implicit acknowledgment that Four Tet’s catalog is a series of variations on a theme. “Part 1,” an extended mash-up between “Planet” and “Dreamer,” opens the album on a high note, hitting Four Tet’s sweet spot of muscular groove and wistful melody and then drawing it out for 16 minutes. “Part 2” turns more labyrinthine: First an ambient snippet of “Ba Teaches Yoga” leads into the stately “Two Thousand and Seventeen”; then, after eight lulling minutes, that song abruptly twists into an extended passage of rapid-fire machine hits, alarm bells, and analog squeals. It’s a neat trick, flipping Four Tet at his most sentimental into an ear-splitting din. Parts three and four, with a combined runtime of 75 minutes, comprise the bulk of the album. Here, Hebden whips through “Scientists,” “Ocoras,” “Only Human,” “Lush,” “Kool FM,” and “Spirit Fingers,” followed by “LA Trance,” “SW9 9SL,” “Locked,” and “Teenage Birdsong”—though close listening reveals trace elements of songs like “Sing” woven into the mix. “Part 4” is particularly impressive: The way he flips melodies and tone colors over shifting beats brings to mind someone snapping the rows of a Rubik’s Cube back and forth. The live shows must have been something to behold: Visual designer team Squidsoup turned the 10,000-capacity hall into a space reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror rooms, stringing up 40,000 digitally controlled LEDs in a massive, three-dimensional grid surrounding Hebden, who performed at crowd level. Video of the event suggests a translation of Four Tet’s flickering rhythms and textures into something you could almost reach out and touch. The audio recording doesn’t capture any of that, of course, but it’s still gratifyingly immersive. There’s just enough crowd noise mixed in to lend the suggestion of being there without being distracting. And for those who haven’t caught Four Tet in concert, Live at Alexandra Palace offers a new way of hearing his music. Much like Daft Punk did with their 2006 Coachella pyramid show, it suggests that Four Tet’s catalog is essentially one endlessly remixable song. — pitchfork
Track List:
01 - Starting
02 - Part 1
03 - Part 2
04 - Part 3
05 - Part 4
06 - Part 5
07 - Ending
Media Report:
Genre: electronic
Country: London, UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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