Four Tet and Remix as a side thinking
“For a while I thought that I probably had done too many remixes and that it was time to stop. Then this came and I couldn’t miss it.” So Kieran Hebden – aka Four Tet – introduced his remix as “halo” of care on Instagram, published in Vinyl for the record store Day and on the platforms as a launch of “Mixes of the Lost World”. Not a real farewell, but a sort of confession.
A large part of the work of a DJ/producer, also of a truly “independent” one and outside the box like Hebden, is moved on to disassemble and recompose the music of others rather than to make it of it. For Four Tet, thanks to the mainstream visibility of recent years, perhaps the time had come to stop. Then comes a song – and what a song, one of the care. Then put your hand back to the digital audio workstation and start again.
From Aphex Twin to treatments
The remix of “Alone” is what is expected of Hebden: a nice groove, great care in the choice of sounds, never over the top. It adds very little – a battery, a few guitar feedback and championship sound – but transforms the track into something else. He looks at her from another perspective, tanning the gloomy of the original version. It is his trademark: minimum, but very recognizable intervention.
After a first career in the post-rock with the Fridge, Kieran Hebden had his first flash of notoriety such as Four Tet in the late 90s with a remix of Aphex Twin, the father of all “intelligent” electronic music. Then he no longer stopped: his official playlist on Spotify contains 94, but it has not been updated for some time and there are many others absent from the platforms.
Remix is an obligatory step, a quick way to earn visibility (and money), especially if you have a cult status but you are not a star. Hebden has always used this format as an extension of his language. Even when he put his hand in mainstream songs, he remained faithful to himself: never a shouted drop, never keyboard, but a festival formula – on the contrary, in one of his most loved remixes, “opus” of the Swedish DJ Eric Prydz, he had fun removing the drop, with displacement effects on the public.
Side thinking (and Remix Bootleg)
Some of his most memorable works come from this philosophy of “lateral thought”. His version of “Nothing Left To Lose” of the Everything But the Girl is a perfect example: he respects the melancholy of the original but suspends it in a hypnotic rhythmic loop. Or the remix of “Is it True” of the Tame Impala, transformed into a chill-out song. The “opal” remix of the Bicep became a cult, ending up becoming one of the best known and listened songs of the DJ/producer duo.
Hebden also knows how to enter Pop without a way and his collaboration with Ellie Goulding proves it: he recently remixed “Easy Lover”, of course, but he also wrote with her some original songs, such as “Baby” and the recent “In My Dreams”. He remixed songs by Coldplay, Rihanna, both and – in an unofficial way – Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift.
The remixes that do not officially exist are another story yet, those made for fun, for an idea that works, but that are listened to only in its DJ sets. Starting from Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You”, which Four Tet has been playing for a couple of years at his shows: a trace already nostalgic in itself, which in his hands becomes a sort of mantra. And there is also the unofficial remix of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story”, created – apparently – for a game with his daughter Swiftie.
An eclectic approach
To understand this eclectic approach, just browse his mega playlist on Spotify from 2399 songs and 185 hours, become a case a few years ago: spiritual jazz, Japanese ambient, grime, Berlin techno, Psych-rock, Bollywood, folk from the world, songwriters. A continuously updated sound encyclopedia.
Maybe really this remix for care will be the last. Or maybe not – in his last post he suggests that the Mazzy Star that could arrive soon. Perhaps it is just a break, a reflection on a format that becomes easily abused and stereotyped. But that in the hands of the right DJ/producer becomes an exercise in style that reminds us that creativity does not reside only in the romantic ideal of absolute originality, but is also expressed in the reworking. As long as made with style.
