Four Tet – “4T Recordings”
Kieran Hebden, the veteran electronic-music beauty-conjurer known as Four Tet, is constantly making and putting out music, but a lot of that music takes the form of one-off singles or collaborations. We don’t get proper Four Tet studio albums as often as we might like, but we’re about to get one. Earlier this year, Hebden announced that he’d release a new LP called Sixteen Oceans, the first proper Four Tet LP since 2017’s New Energy, in March. It happens to be March now. And as Pitchfork points out, Hebden has now tweeted that Sixteen Oceans is coming next week. He’s also shared a new track from it.
Before today, Hebden had shared two tracks from Sixteen Oceans, both of which had been on the hazier, prettier side of the Four Tet continuum: “Teenage Birdsong” and the Ellie Goulding collaboration “Baby.” Today, Hebden has shared “4T Recordings,” a song named after the stage name that Hebden used for his earliest solo-electronic recordings. (Hebden put out his first 4T Recordings music in 1997, when he was still a teenager in the post-rock band Fridge.)
“4T Recordings” is of a piece with “Teenage Birdsong” and “Baby,” which could mean that we’re in for an extremely pretty Four Tet album. “4T Recordings” is a new-agey throat-clearing of a track, and it has no drum sounds at all. Instead, Hebden makes light, dizzy atmosphere out of a frisky synth arpeggio and a sampled house-diva coo. Listen below.
Sixteen Oceans is out 3/13 on Hebden’s own Text Records.