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Track List
01) A Joy
02) Smile Around the Face
03) Fuji Check
04) Sun Drums and Soil
05) Clouding
06) High Fives
07) Turtle Turtle Up
08) Sleep, Eat Food, Have Visions
09) You Were There With Me
10) And Then Patterns
Cd 2
01) Turtle Turtle Up (extended version)
02) Sun Drums and Soil, Part 2
03) Watching Wavelength
04) This Is Six Minutes
05) Ending
01) A Joy
02) Smile Around the Face
03) Fuji Check
04) Sun Drums and Soil
05) Clouding
06) High Fives
07) Turtle Turtle Up
08) Sleep, Eat Food, Have Visions
09) You Were There With Me
10) And Then Patterns
Cd 2
01) Turtle Turtle Up (extended version)
02) Sun Drums and Soil, Part 2
03) Watching Wavelength
04) This Is Six Minutes
05) Ending
0:00
0:00
0:00
0:00
0:00
0:00
0:00
0:00
0:00
0:00
16:16
5:31
4:31
6:03
0:50
Data Complete
70%
Total Rating
70%Total Rating
(3 users)
Back Cover
CD Art
3D Case
3D Thumb
3D Flat
3D Face
3D Spine
First Released
2005
Indie
Gentle
Electronic
---
Medium
Album
0 copies
Album Description
Available in:
Everything Ecstatic is the fourth album by Four Tet, released on 23 May 2005.
The video for lead single "Smile Around the Face" features actor Mark Heap.
User Album Review
Producer and multi-instrumentalist Kieran Hebden's CV certainly makes for singular reading. At 15, he formed a school band called Fridge. They were signed to hip London dance label Output, and released complicated instrumentals called things like Moore EH4-800 that straddled the divide between experimental electronica and the dreaded noodling of American post-rock.
As you might expect from a band bearing the influence of post-rock - not so much a genre as the answer to a pub or dinner party argument about what constitutes the most boring music of all time - Fridge weren't exactly a hoot. Nevertheless, you have to admit, their achievements outstripped the usual teenage musical path of lumbering through an off-key version of Smells Like Teen Spirit in the end-of-term assembly, then splitting acrimoniously when the bass player's girlfriend gets off with the drummer. When Hebden went to university, he used it not as an opportunity to hone his drug-taking and extended lie-in skills, but to launch a solo career under the name Four Tet.
His early releases attracted a strain of critical praise that could instil in the average reader a burning desire to get as far away from Four Tet's early releases as is physically possible - regrettable phrases like "turntablism" and "heavily influenced by free jazz" were bandied about with regularity. However, by the time of his third full-length album, 2003's Rounds, Hebden had honed his disparate influences into something that might appeal beyond subscribers to the Wire magazine and the kind of weblog-writing wonk who even as you read this is hastening to their laptop to type a pithy 300,000-word riposte, angrily explaining how a musical diet of turntablism and free jazz has made them the barrel of laughs they are today.
Rounds' appealing combination of acoustic instrumentation, hip-hop influenced beats and glitchy electronics both nudged Hebden towards the mainstream (indeed, that twinkly, harp-laden chill-out music wafting around the dinner table as you proclaim post-rock the most boring music of all time could well be its stand-out track My Angel Rocks Back and Forth) and proved highly influential. A whole sub-genre was born in its wake, dubbed folktronica.
The latter seemed to be the final straw, Perhaps noting the worrying aroma of Mike Oldfield that hangs around much music produced under the folktronica banner, or perhaps simply unwilling to be associated with any such movement so appallingly named, Hebden's follow-up to Rounds is a distinct shift away from the pastoral.
Everything Ecstatic opens with a track seemingly designed to scare off any new fans that Rounds brought in, and deliver Four Tet back to the wonks. Erroneously named A Joy, it features a maddening, increasingly distorted one-note bassline, spluttering drum samples and wave after wave of horrible electronic noise. There is something admirable about A Joy's wilful perversity, but an album's worth of wilful perversity could deplete your stock of admiration pretty quickly, so it comes as a relief when A Joy fades away, replaced by the glorious Smile Around the Face. This time, the title is not a knowing joke; the percussive clatter feels less like having your head shoved into the blades of a powerful electric fan and more like Can's Jaki Liebezeit going at full pelt, while the track's hook - an irresistible, wordless, high-pitched female vocal - seems like a skewed, Anglicised take on hip-hop producer Kanye West's penchant for helium vocals. It is heady, wonderful stuff.
More wonderful still is that it sets the tone for much of the rest of the album, which pitches battering, funky rhythms - equal parts hip-hop, Krautrock and jazz - against blissful, slowly shifting textures: tinkling bells and piano on And Then Patterns; lazy hip-hop scratching and gamelan-inspired clank on High Fives; droning saxophones and oddly cut-up female vocals on Sun, Drums and Soil.
There are certainly moments where the album slips into abstruse indulgence - Turtle Turtle Up's jarring collection of samples bears the influence of drill'n'bass, the fly-against-a-windowpane racket pioneered by Squarepusher, and another strong contender for the most boring music of all time title - but even at its most obscure, there's enough going on to hold the listener's attention.
Hebden has said that the inspiration for Everything Ecstatic's stylistic shift was "the hype about dance music being dead". It certainly succeeds in showing up how uninspired major dance acts have been sounding of late. There are more ideas in a few minutes of Everything Ecstatic than on most big dance producers' recent albums. At its best - Smile Around the Face, And Then Patterns - the lovely, hazy, sun-dappled atmosphere it conjures up is entirely its own. As the gentle, drifting, You Were There With Me brings the album to a suitably beatific close, Hebden seems a more singular character than ever.
SOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/may/20/popandrock.shopping1
External Album Reviews
None...
User Comments
Available in:
Everything Ecstatic is the fourth album by Four Tet, released on 23 May 2005.
The video for lead single "Smile Around the Face" features actor Mark Heap.
User Album Review
Producer and multi-instrumentalist Kieran Hebden's CV certainly makes for singular reading. At 15, he formed a school band called Fridge. They were signed to hip London dance label Output, and released complicated instrumentals called things like Moore EH4-800 that straddled the divide between experimental electronica and the dreaded noodling of American post-rock.
As you might expect from a band bearing the influence of post-rock - not so much a genre as the answer to a pub or dinner party argument about what constitutes the most boring music of all time - Fridge weren't exactly a hoot. Nevertheless, you have to admit, their achievements outstripped the usual teenage musical path of lumbering through an off-key version of Smells Like Teen Spirit in the end-of-term assembly, then splitting acrimoniously when the bass player's girlfriend gets off with the drummer. When Hebden went to university, he used it not as an opportunity to hone his drug-taking and extended lie-in skills, but to launch a solo career under the name Four Tet.
His early releases attracted a strain of critical praise that could instil in the average reader a burning desire to get as far away from Four Tet's early releases as is physically possible - regrettable phrases like "turntablism" and "heavily influenced by free jazz" were bandied about with regularity. However, by the time of his third full-length album, 2003's Rounds, Hebden had honed his disparate influences into something that might appeal beyond subscribers to the Wire magazine and the kind of weblog-writing wonk who even as you read this is hastening to their laptop to type a pithy 300,000-word riposte, angrily explaining how a musical diet of turntablism and free jazz has made them the barrel of laughs they are today.
Rounds' appealing combination of acoustic instrumentation, hip-hop influenced beats and glitchy electronics both nudged Hebden towards the mainstream (indeed, that twinkly, harp-laden chill-out music wafting around the dinner table as you proclaim post-rock the most boring music of all time could well be its stand-out track My Angel Rocks Back and Forth) and proved highly influential. A whole sub-genre was born in its wake, dubbed folktronica.
The latter seemed to be the final straw, Perhaps noting the worrying aroma of Mike Oldfield that hangs around much music produced under the folktronica banner, or perhaps simply unwilling to be associated with any such movement so appallingly named, Hebden's follow-up to Rounds is a distinct shift away from the pastoral.
Everything Ecstatic opens with a track seemingly designed to scare off any new fans that Rounds brought in, and deliver Four Tet back to the wonks. Erroneously named A Joy, it features a maddening, increasingly distorted one-note bassline, spluttering drum samples and wave after wave of horrible electronic noise. There is something admirable about A Joy's wilful perversity, but an album's worth of wilful perversity could deplete your stock of admiration pretty quickly, so it comes as a relief when A Joy fades away, replaced by the glorious Smile Around the Face. This time, the title is not a knowing joke; the percussive clatter feels less like having your head shoved into the blades of a powerful electric fan and more like Can's Jaki Liebezeit going at full pelt, while the track's hook - an irresistible, wordless, high-pitched female vocal - seems like a skewed, Anglicised take on hip-hop producer Kanye West's penchant for helium vocals. It is heady, wonderful stuff.
More wonderful still is that it sets the tone for much of the rest of the album, which pitches battering, funky rhythms - equal parts hip-hop, Krautrock and jazz - against blissful, slowly shifting textures: tinkling bells and piano on And Then Patterns; lazy hip-hop scratching and gamelan-inspired clank on High Fives; droning saxophones and oddly cut-up female vocals on Sun, Drums and Soil.
There are certainly moments where the album slips into abstruse indulgence - Turtle Turtle Up's jarring collection of samples bears the influence of drill'n'bass, the fly-against-a-windowpane racket pioneered by Squarepusher, and another strong contender for the most boring music of all time title - but even at its most obscure, there's enough going on to hold the listener's attention.
Hebden has said that the inspiration for Everything Ecstatic's stylistic shift was "the hype about dance music being dead". It certainly succeeds in showing up how uninspired major dance acts have been sounding of late. There are more ideas in a few minutes of Everything Ecstatic than on most big dance producers' recent albums. At its best - Smile Around the Face, And Then Patterns - the lovely, hazy, sun-dappled atmosphere it conjures up is entirely its own. As the gentle, drifting, You Were There With Me brings the album to a suitably beatific close, Hebden seems a more singular character than ever.
SOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/may/20/popandrock.shopping1
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