Kieran Hebden’s Four Tet project has long been at the core of contemporary, experimental music, delivering some of the most meandering and diverse productions of this past decade, displaying a rare ability to direct emotion with subtle shifts of melody and rhythm. We’ve seen it on albums like Rounds and There is Love in You, and more recently the peculiar Morning/Evening, a project made up of just two long-form pieces. This artful layering is mostly just on record though, and while Four Tet never completely disappoints live, many of the delicate shifts that make his recordings so effective seem hard to communicate with the atmosphere of a concert, instead employing visuals to atone for some of that loss in quality. At Four Tet’s recent show in Sydney Opera House’s Concert Hall, the masterful producer teamed up with multimedia collective SquidSoup to do just that, delivering a seamless blend of his work and power it with a captivating, Intel-driven 3D light show.
Behind Hebden and his piles of equipment were thousands of bead-like spheres shaped as a grid, glistening like stalactites cascading down from the ceiling. These would channel different shades of colour, forming patterns that first started off simple and became more and more chaotic with each layer Hebden would use to build the first few pieces. In no time it looked as if Hebden had orchestrated a large 8-bit screen filled with video game-like waves that would crash into each other and break apart as often as he would split rhythm and melody, only to bring it all back together in light and sound; a reunion soundtracked by the adoring crowd.
Trust is what much of the patience-testing indulgence came down to at times; at many points it wasn’t clear where Hebden was going with such repetitive patterns, but our faith in him was mostly restored as soon as he’d pull it all together, marrying disparate sounds and gluing it with a consistent style of deep house.
Hebden’s ethereal collections of various sounds were vast and made the transitions between songs like “Jupiters” all the more impressive, but there was still a burden of repetition most salient throughout the performance, while most variations were a bit too subtle to keep interest from fluctuating as frequently as SquidSoup’s stunning set.
By the time Four Tet wrapped things up by playing around with the full version of “Morning Side” – a song which loses some of it’s tenderness live – we knew that there wasn’t going to be much outside of a hypnotic barrage of deep house, no departure into the various other styles he is equally efficient with. No, he wanted us to dance, and while there was nothing at all wrong with that – especially with that light spectacle – it would have been nice to hear Hebden make some more extreme choices given the range of his recorded work.
For more on the technology used to create the light show check Intel out on Twitter and Facebook.
Images supplied and credited to Mark Metcalfe.
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