There’s something about Four Tet that’s always kinda deflected any potential interest I had in seeking out his sounds. I guess I’ve operated under the assumption, after hearing a handful of remixes in my dance floor days, that his palette tends toward blending fawnky and brainy in a way that has, in the past, left me over-funked or under-whelmed. I mean, he’s on Domino, for fuck’s sake. Everyone on Domino either IS a bunny or kills them.
This new E.P. of his, though, has me ready and willing to admit I’ve been a horrible judge of sonic character:
The Ringer E.P.’s title track crossed my ears in a mix he did for Fader, and their commentary got the essence spot-on: it’s a cyclone of a jam, a menagerie of sounds that at first sounds like the sort of cyclical freak-funk jamming of Animal Collective if performed by nothing but laser-show robots. Around 4:50, though, glitches begin to infiltrate the circuitry, but sparks don’t fly, nor do gears grind, until almost exactly 8 minutes in. Then, suddenly, the drum fill bursts in through the front door and the entire world crashes in for just…a…secondwait we’re back and stable and restored. This track, to completion, is the experience having one foot in the apocalypse and the other in the same world Bjork lived in when she made Post.
Not the calyp-tic braindance odyssey it seems at first, “Wing Body Wing” pops, freaks and snaps around like an early Plaid track until the grain filter decays that popsnap into the prettiest summer top-down Techno song you’ve heard this year. There’s a desire, in “Wing Body Wing”, to make a tech statement-a statement about rock, and techno, and melody, and raw guitars played by machines, but none of that matters. This is the return of unexpectedly lovely Techno.
