Folktronica poster boy turned dance aficionado, Four Tet - aka Keiren Hebden - is on his way to Australia for the Laneway  and Sydney Festivals in February. Here we chat with him about his DJing work, the nuts and bolts of songcraft and the revelations of hindsight.

Ringer EP was definitely one of the outstanding EPs of the year, for me, and it’s been picked up by DJs and works well. Was this close to your intention?

I’ve been listening to a lot of techno recently, and it’s been creeping into a lot of the music that I’ve been making. So I just wanted to put out Ringer as a way of giving people an update as to where my head’s at.

It’s my take on recent dance music, but with my own twist on things – with a different feel. It’s about crossing into that realm, but on my own terms.

Tell me a little bit about the process of putting the tracks together – it’s got a very soft, sonorous tone to it that makes it really easy to listen to, actually. They sound to me like analogue synthesizers – is that the case?

I spent a long time working on the tones, getting them all just right. I do that with everything I do. It’s also really about making sure it’s got a special feel and sound.

I’ve used a range of sources: old analogue synths, some sounds taken directly off old vinyl that have a soft, warm tone to them like you might find on old hip-hop productions. A lot of techno producers favour very clean sounds, but I use a lot of drum hits from old records and so forth, and this gives the overall effect a very different feel.

How does a track begin?

Sometimes I start with a melody. Sometimes I imagine a whole track, and then the task is to ‘make it exist’, to bring it into the world.

You’ve been doing more and more DJing work over the past year or two. How has that fed back into your productions? How do the different disciplines feed into each other?

DJing has made me think very carefully about how my records sound at high volumes. When you play in a club, watching people respond to a track in an immediate, physical way – that’s a very exciting thing. And seeing that, it makes you want to add that rhythmic punch: so my music’s changed to reflect that, quite a lot.

Dance music feels very fresh to me right now… now that it’s moved back underground, I go to clubs and you notice that people are really there for the music, not because they’ve read about a certain club or DJ in a magazine, the way it used to be several years ago. It feels very inviting. I DJed for nine hours the other night. It was just so fantastic, just this long night being able to explore all these different kinds of music while soaking up the atmosphere.

Musically, dance music just seems so much more adventurous and experimental than a lot of the other worlds I’ve been involved in.

What kinds of sounds have you really been digging?

I love all the music on Border Community, it’s one of my favourite labels. Ricardo Villalobos’ stuff this year has been so exciting. Not so much his DJing, but his productions. He’s been putting out these really weird records that are just fifteen minutes of this sublime rattling drums. To be honest it’s much more like some kinds of jazz. And I’ve also been really, really into mid 80s Chicago house. I’ve been obsessing over Ron Hardy’s work, as well as Armando. It’s really exciting music.

The way dance music’s mixed these days, the art and science of it, it’s just leagues ahead of what’s happening in rock music – which is just mastered to be as loud as possible on the radio. There’s no subtlety going on. It’s just too much, and it doesn’t invite you to listen to the album in its entirety. I saw a documentary on Neil Young the other day that made me revisit my records – and you can listen to a whole album, and it’s a relaxing experience. It’s not exhaustingly fatiguing. So much contemporary guitar-based music is just an onslaught. Even the ballads are just banging in your face.

What kinds of things can we expect from your upcoming performances here?

Same as usual: some computers, samplers – and I’m going to play a lot of new music. I’m working on a lot of new stuff, and it should be a chance to try some of it out. But I don’t tie myself to one thing, you know? I plan to play a different set on every date. I want it to be a week of different experiences.

There also seems to be an emphasis on your part in using very ‘regular equipment’ to make music – I noticed for the stuff you did with Steve Reid that you were just using a cheap Roland DJ effector.

Yeah, I was using these Boss Dr Sample things – three of them. But I’ll use whatever. Whatever comes to hand, whatever works. I’m not one of those people with an enormous studio. I get a couple of things and I get really into it. I’ve been trying out a bunch of soft synths recently, exploring them, but I’m very wary of getting trapped in that place where you spend most of your time playing with and figuring out new equipment. It really should be about making music. I often find I stick with things for a long time, long after everyone else has moved on. I mean, I’m using the same sequencer I’ve been using for eight years now. But, I just like to use whatever I can use to get the best and most music out of.

Working as you do in a kind of interstice between electronic music and indie rock, what would you say is something that musicians could learn from producers and DJs, and vice versa?

A lot of electronic music I hear, you can listen to it and imagine what it looks like on the sequencer interface. People making electronic music these days get so absorbed in the visual aspect of it that they structure things in an obvious way. That’s definitely a trap. But, if you were just playing guitar, you wouldn’t necessarily follow the ‘signs’ indicated by what’s on screen, and this can make things more interesting. But one of the reasons why I make electronic music so much is that I try to come up with something on the guitar, I try to make something original and interesting, and it’s almost impossible. That’s the problem with the guitar: it’s like the most over-explored instrument ever. Everybody has tried everything. Whereas composing using a computer, it’s much easier to come up with something that has a unique feel. For me, what’s important is to find these fresh approaches, to seek out new and different ways of doing things.

So could we say that’s what’s most important for you: expression, creativity, just trying to channel the expression through any means available?

Yeah, for sure. And I am very excited by this new technology, and the breakthroughs it can cause in music. Historically, that’s why the stuff that came out when the electric guitar was invented was so excited, the stuff that happened when the first drum machines and samplers came out. Now there’s all sorts of new shit coming out, and I want to be at the forefront, exploring that. I don't just want to involve myself in the shitty recreation of something that happened thirty years ago.

It does sound like there’s a very strong retro reflex at work in a lot of music these days though, wouldn’t you say? Music which is, in fact, going out of its way to sound dogmatically retro, to precisely evoke a given sound from the past.

Yeah, well you can’t go see Led Zeppelin these days, and the Stones are getting a bit old, aren’t they? So in that way it’s nice to have a band around with a similar sound so you can go and enjoy that experience. But for me, personally, in terms of the real innovation that is actually occurring now – I mean, I can go and see someone playing straight ahead punk or rock and totally enjoy it, but I hardly think about it as an ‘exciting development in music’. It becomes something else, in some way.

That’s interesting. One of my friends was saying to me the other day though that techno, to take a different example, needs to find an imagination of music that’s not predicated on technological development. The reason minimal, as a genre, if it was one, hit a dead end, was because it was nothing else but technological – just the sound of Ableton.

Yeah, but as time passes and we can look back, we’ll see that some of these techno records, sure it is technology that’s driving it, but they’ve still got this element of soulfulness – there’s real passion in there. It’s similar to the early house I was talking about. There’s a raw power in there. And the things that have really been maginificent, and that have stood the test of time, you don’t listen to them and go ‘oh this is go great because it’s the first record to use that drum machine’. It’s great because of its energy, its life. You can have all the technology in the world, but if you don’t give your soul to it, it’s not going to have any impact. It’s about trying to do something that’s new and that touches people, at the same time.  

That’s really interesting…. last of all, I wanted to ask you a kind of stock question I ask a lot of people, which is, what’s something that you really know now about making music that you wish someone would have told you when you started out?

It’s the other way around. I wish there were so many things that I didn’t know. I think when you make your first records, you’ve got this naivety. A lot of the records I love the most are people’s first records. There’s this amazing naïve magic in there. And you never, ever get that back. You become far too knowing about what you’re doing. For me, there’s nothing I want to know. I want to get rid of it. I spend hours obsessing over the sounds of music, the EQ on a bassdrum, or something. When I was a kid I would have given that five seconds, then moved on to a million other things. And the usic I would have made would probably be more interesting for all that. I miss that

Is that part of your interest in Chicago house? Because certainly one of the things I love about it is its naivety, and maybe sentimentality, too.

Yeah. I think there’s something about the most wonderful music that goes beyond just technique and artfulness – it’s just pure expression. And as gain a more sophisticated understanding of what you’re doing, it can get harder and harder to dip into that. Whereas when you just start out you can almost only dip into that.

Pete Chambers

FOUR TET - AUSTRALIAN TOUR DATES

Jan 28 - Beck's Bar, Sydney Festival, Sydney
Jan 31 - Laneway Festival, Brisbane
Feb 1 - Laneway Festival, Melbourne
Feb 6 - Laneway Festival, Perth
Feb 7 - Laneway Festival, Adelaide
Feb 8 - Laneway Festival, Sydney