Laptop science isn't going to be christened the new rock'n'roll anytime soon, since it remains the preserve of boys who probably take music far more seriously than is strictly healthy. Still, you have to take this stuff seriously when your teeth are chattering because a bass frequency deep enough to loosen screws in Watford is being triggered by an apparently benign Apple Mac. That 'folktronica' tag seems far too cuddly a description for what Kieran Hebden's doing tonight.
Live, he drops the polite niceties affected on record and exposes his rude bwoy inclinations with a set that's on familiar terms with bashment parties and pirate radio stations. On 'She Moves She' the recognisable lilting guitar motif is there somewhere, low in the mix and buried by a hail of 2-step beats. As the track forges on he keeps throwing in sharp bolts of sampled noise that disrupt the melody but force the crisp digital drums into even clearer focus.
Everything is bigger and dirtier. The bass is heavy enough for Zed Bias or Dillinja. The repetition is, at times, as insistent as the deepest of deep house music. The drums shake and rattle like the best hip hop production that never was put together by a hip hop producer. It's music that snatches its sounds from every which way and, miraculously, throws it all together with beautiful digital coherence. The acoustic-electronic dynamic no longer smacks of 'concept' but sounds like a genuine form of which Hebden is almost certainly the master.
The added dimension live comes from his ability to introduce a form of (limited) improvisation. Unlike those laptop acts that simply stare uncomfortably at their Macs, making occasional adjustments whilst the tracks essentially play like big mp3 files, Four Tet is reconfigured onstage. The influence of free jazz may be less apparent in the recorded output that has followed debut album, 'Dialogue', but it's something of that extravagant musical freedom that he's after in live performance.
The computers, of course, have other ideas but with the help of an effects unit and sampler, sounds can be introduced and subjected to enough reverb, delay, echo and all manner of filtering to create a sound range with which to build on top of the structure of the sequenced tracks. At times he overdoes it, like a hyperactive DJ that can't leave the cross fader alone. But, when it works, laptop performance doesn't seem like quite such a daft idea after all. There are genuine 'tunes' here that elicit a thrill of recognition from the crowd: the ridiculously funky 'Twenty Three' and 'As Serious As Your Life', with its crashing cymbals, even inspire some dancing. 'Calamine' threatens to turn it into a full-blown club night.
On this form, Four Tet bridges the gap between chin-stroking electronica and the more simple and direct pleasures of 'underground' music so well that it verges on the radical. Now, where did all the girls go?
