Kieran Hebden is a kind of Renaissance man of contemporary music: eclectic without making self-consciously willful musical statements to prove it; equally at home with live instrumentation as he is in love with heavily processed electronic sound and a DJ to boot with all the enthusiasm for the new that the role ought to imply.
Loved equally by the dance and rock press his musical vision eclipses the limits of both. His range of influence is almost 'brave' in a time when the blurring of the lines between the avant-garde and the commercial is the source of all sorts of paranoid and defensive pronouncements.
By day he's part of post-rock act Fridge, sometime live band with none other than Badly Drawn Boy. Whilst, on his nights off, he DJs around the world playing sets that incorporate everything from Missy Elliot to the minimal extremes of the UK Garage underground. He for one is surely aware of the fact that Squarepusher's recent 2 Step pastiche is hardly the last word in innovation where these beats are concerned.
Those expecting 'Pause' to wear contemporary influences on its sleeve, however, will be disappointed. The album doesn't even suggest the music that makes up a Kieran Hebden DJ set as obliquely as did last year's collaboration with Pole. Instead, it makes a far more sonically ambitious statement than its predecessors, perfectly fusing organic sounds with production techniques that are usually the preserve of underground dance producers or R&B mavericks.
The sounds in this case are those of the acoustic folk of Jim O'Rourke and his predecessors John Fahey, Pentangle and Nick Drake. But it's what happens to these sounds that's most remarkable when they're squeezed through the PC. As he recently explained in an interview with dotmusic, it's the attempt to bring these sounds and textures into the structure of his beloved repetition that became the project's "key idea."
It's an idea that results in tracks like 'Untangle' in which programmed drums meet perfectly fragile plucked strings with the grace and understatement of 50's Japanese cinema and 'Twenty Three': the funkiest British folk track never made. Other tracks like 'Parks' demonstrate a more traditional song structure and one that could only be accomplished in such an entirely electronic production by a producer that understands the dynamic of a band. The rigid structure of dance music and R&B is replaced with a synthetic approximation of 'live' form giving the album its most exciting dynamic.
The most frightening thing about it all is that Hebden gives the impression of knocking this beautifully complex music off in his sleep between recording sessions for the third album with Fridge and the business of starting up his own record label, Text Records. Pray he doesn't break down under the weight of it all, 'cause if he finds time, he's threatening to put out some club-targeted white labels. How good would that be?
by James Poletti