As Four Tet, Kieran Hebden has been a chameleonic interpreter of genres. Using a cut-up and collage approach, he's bent folk music, jazz, and hip-hop into impossible shapes; each time we seem to draw a bead on his style, whether it's folktronica, instrumental hip-hop, or IDM, Hebden neatly steps out of the crosshairs to leave us firing at thin air. In fact, his music is best understood according to practice. From the folky samples of Pause to the laptop bobbins of Rounds to the free-jazzy squalls of his collaborations with drummer Steve Reid, Hebden has seemed less interested in developing genres than in absorbing their tropes into his own hermetic sound world. What distinguishes Four Tet's albums isn't so much the kind of music he appropriates as how he uses it, and in this he's been fairly consistent: He snips and smears until his sources all but vanish into his crisp polyrhythms.
On his superlative album Rounds, Hebden's music did indeed seem round: It moved in great languid whorls, always closing in on itself. The song "Spirit Fingers", which fluttered and darted like a hummingbird, was an exception. In retrospect, "Spirit Fingers" seems to presage the four-song "mini-album" Ringer, which is as well-served by its title as Rounds was. Here, Hebden can no longer be meaningfully compared to Prefuse 73, as the album's dialed-down cut-ups and continuous rhythms render it too smoove for IDM.
At four songs, Ringer is economical, but the diversity within its half-hour run time makes it surprisingly robust as well. This is meant to be Hebden's techno-based album, with flashes of Afrobeat and krautrock. You'll catch whiffs of the former in the sidewinding percussion of "Wing Body Wing", and of the latter in the buried pulsation of "Swimmer" (not to mention 8-bit techno in the pixelated sprays of the title track). But as always, Hebden's latest is most interesting at the level of theme-- Ringer is about concealment and revelation, and it gains a great deal of tension in its quick juxtapositions of the two.
There is something tantalizing about these four tracks, which, at times, seems to verge on the lascivious. The title track thrums for ten hotwired minutes, but there's a sense of something being held back; the loping house beat it implies never actually appears. One of its sub-melodies comes into view measure by measure, showing a little more of its progression each time, like a hem creeping slowly up a thigh. This isn't the Four Tet who shoves shunts into his rhythms; "Ringer" unfolds with inexorable logic. But it's a logic parallel to the one we might normally expect, which exhorts a track like this to eventually break into a climactic clearing.
If "Ringer" flirts with the thwarted epiphany, then "Ribbons" (by my reckoning, the album's highlight) makes up for the tease by enacting the moment of revelation over and over, rooting itself in the ecstatic experience. Hebden punches trills into the seething percussion at various speeds and durations, sometimes slow and wet, sometimes quick and ringing; sometimes discretely separated, sometimes truncated and overlapped. It's the sound of a series of beaded curtains being thrown back, divulging more curtains: all revelation, nothing revealed.
After the flirtatious "Ribbons", Hebden pulls back coyly with the hypnotic "Swimmer": A wavering monotone surrounds it, exposing bits of gargling synths and holding back any sort of release until the halfway point, when the percussion suddenly snakes through the monotone like ivy. The closing track, "Wing Body Wing", is slightly less interesting than the others; its emphasis on bare-naked percussion makes it sound like half of a Sound of Silver-era LCD Soundsystem track. The rhythms are adroit, but seem to long for something more. Nevertheless, "Wing Body Wing" is the only time when the album's strategic omissions dilute its impact rather than bolstering it.
