Dialogue

Album review

In 1998, at barely 20 years old, Kieran Hebden was already an extremely active musician. He had just signed to Output Records, Trevor Jackson’s label, with Fridge, the post-rock trio obsessed with sampling led by himself, Adem Ilhan and Sam Jeffers. He then went solo with the release of Thirtysixtwentyfive on Output, his first “album” composed of two 18 minute tracks. An iconoclasm which allowed him to record his first “true” album one year later in February 1999 with Dialogue, this time with separate, distinctive tracks.

The arrival of this record on streaming platforms twenty years later opens a door to an “adolescent Four Tet” who had not yet become an electronic music star and the most sought-after remixer in England. It’s clear that this early Four Tet was already highly influenced by hip-hop and jazz as these elements are mixed into the record for what would be the first time. The beginning of The Space of Two reminds one of the abstract hip-hop heard of Prefuse 73. The record then unfolds into a very jazzy sound and drums which urge you to dance (Misnomer and the cosmic jazz The Butterfly Effect). Calamine is certainly the track which most foreshadows Four Tet’s future, with its use of strings and a more psychedelic sound with trance-like flutes from Emma Lindley and percussion mixed into the background. This record was not far away from his masterpiece Rounds, which was released four years later in 2003. © Smaêl Bouaici/Qobuz