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Track List
01) Hands
02) She Moves She
03) First Thing
04) My Angel Rocks Back and Forth
05) Spirit Fingers
06) Unspoken
07) Chia
08) As Serious as Your Life
09) And They All Look Broken Hearted
10) Slow Jam
01) Hands
02) She Moves She
03) First Thing
04) My Angel Rocks Back and Forth
05) Spirit Fingers
06) Unspoken
07) Chia
08) As Serious as Your Life
09) And They All Look Broken Hearted
10) Slow Jam
5:41
4:41
1:13
5:07
3:22
9:31
0:32
4:48
5:09
5:18
Data Complete
90%
Total Rating
90%Total Rating
(3 users)
Back Cover
CD Art
3D Case
3D Thumb
3D Flat
3D Face
3D Spine
First Released
2003
Indie
Gentle
Electronic
---
Medium
Album
0 copies
Album Description
Available in:
Rounds is the third solo album by British electronic musician Kieran Hebden, released under his alias Four Tet on 5 May 2003 by Domino Recording Company. Wanting to make a more personal record, Hebden recorded and produced the album in his North London flat over ten months using a desktop computer and a home hi-fi system. Its ten tracks feature elements of hip-hop, jazz and folk; apart from a guitar part recorded for "Slow Jam", the music is composed from between 200 and 300 samples, many processed beyond recognition.
Rounds produced two singles and one EP. Critics praised its unique fusion of electronic and organic styles, and Metacritic lists it as the fourth best-reviewed album of 2003. Several publications included Rounds on "best albums of the decade" lists. In May 2013, on the tenth anniversary of its release, Domino reissued Rounds with a bonus disc including a 2004 live performance.
Background and recording
After being a member of Fridge since 1995, Kieran Hebden began releasing solo records under the name Four Tet in 1998. His first release was the "Thirtysixtwentyfive" single, followed by the albums Dialogue in 1999 and Pause in 2001. The albums were influenced by hip-hop, jazz and electronic music. Hebden felt his output had sounded too much like his influences and wanted to make a record that was more personal and harder to define. He drew on influences including Pete Rock, DJ Premier, Jim O'Rourke, Timbaland, the Neptunes and Rodney Jerkins.
Hebden recorded Rounds over ten months in his North London flat, using a desktop computer and a home hi-fi system. With the exception of a guitar part recorded for "Slow Jam", he composed the music exclusively from a file of samples he had assembled over several years. The album uses between 200 and 300 samples; each song is built from between 20 and 30 samples heavily processed with the software packages AudioMulch and Cool Edit Pro, in many cases beyond recognition. The nine-minute track "Unspoken" was originally based on a sample from the Tori Amos song "Winter" but was reworked when Hebden failed to get sample clearance. Hebden also used a Creative Labs microphone to record the guitar part for "Slow Jam" and some sounds from television and sequenced the results in Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.
After spending the early part of his career naming his songs with random words, Hebden decided to use more meaningful titles. "As Serious as Your Life" takes its name from a 1977 Val Wilmer book about free jazz in New York City. Hebden was given a copy of the book by his father and said "I did hope that some kid would get interested and ask what the title was and then check out the book, so it's a bit like leaving little trails for people." He was inspired to title the album Rounds after hearing that his sister had been singing a musical round, telling an interviewer: "It seemed totally relevant; a round is all about repetition and phasing, which is the essence of what I've been doing since I've been making music."
Music
Kieran Hebden produced Rounds almost entirely from heavily processed samples.
Rounds contains ten instrumental tracks with a total running time of 45 minutes, which Colin Joyce of Spin called a "folktronica tapestry." Clash noted that Four Tet helped pioneer the folktronica genre with Pause and Rounds. Sound on Sound writer Sam Inglis said that the album was a "blend of fragile acoustic fragments, brutal beats and glitchy electronica"; The Age described it as "electronic music that sounds deceptively organic." Guardian critic David Peschek, who noted the influence of hip-hop, R&B and folk music, wrote that "Rounds invents its own dizzying, unlikely genres." John Bush of AllMusic found the album contained elements of electronic and experimental music combined with "a dreamy melodicism sure to endear it to indie pop fans." Dusted critic Michael Crumsho noticed the influence of folk and jazz, writing that Hebden had "taken his earlier nods to other specific genres and turned them into something wholly his own." PopMatters' Adrien Begrand noted how "Hebden shifts the focus from hip-hop beats, jazz influences, and far-reaching sonic adventurousness, to a more spare, focused sound" that contributed to Rounds' original sound. Nick Southall, in his review for Stylus magazine, stated that "it is more of the same, but 'the same' for Four Tet is perpetual evolution and motion."
"Unspoken" was named by several critics as the album's centrepiece; Begrand described it as "virtuosic laptop music". NME critic Tony Naylor thought that "As Serious as Your Life" was one of the album's more straightforward songs. The album's closing track, "Slow Jam", which Pitchfork reviewer Andy Beta said "has that long goodbye of the best melancholy closers," was described by Begrand as a "warm, wide-eyed, watching-the-sun-rise song" that features chiming guitars and a sample of a child's squeaky toy.
User Album Review
he year 2003 was a heady one for listening. On computers in the post-Napster landscape, guitar-rock intermingled with avant-garde classical music as well as “clicks’n’cuts,” which in turn could mix with twee indie rock and the thumps of backpack rap. After Kid A, analog components could fuck with guitars and laptops and soon a slew of new artists were pushing beyond these genre distinctions: DFA’s discopunk was already afoot, Jim O’Rourke had morphed from resplendent indie-pop fingerpicker to laptop noisenik, a producer from Florida named Diplo was mashing together heavy psychedelic rock breaks into something for rap heads, while underground hip-hop was getting strange and musty thanks to Madlib’s myriad personas.
The Class of 2003 also offered up three upcoming producers who embraced every sound on their hard drives and within one month that year, they all released their breakthrough efforts. There was Prefuse 73’s One Word Extinguisher, the soon-to-be-renamed-Caribou’s Up in Flames, and Four Tet's Rounds. The first melded IDM’s glitches to backpacker breaks while the second mashed it to psychedelic sunshine pop; Rounds, the third album for Kieran Hebden's project, grabbed at all of the above while also including jazz and folk. For the listeners out there who knew Hebden from his days in instrumental post-rock outfit Fridge and who might have considered his early recordings under the name of Four Tet as more of a side attraction than main gig, Rounds announced the arrival of one of electronic music’s vanguard producers.
The album opened with a recording of a dog’s heartbeat before Hebden lets it bloom into free meter drum rolls that evoked the amoebic pulses that defined late 60s experimental jazz before tightening it all up with a beat that headnodded at hip-hop without quite being beholden to it. That three distinct rhythms (cardiac, jazz, hip-hop) could effortlessly convene on “Hands” augured Hebden’s formidable beat skills, which even in the present tense pull from house, 2-step, Afrobeat, and dubstep while remaining singular.
It makes sense that Hebden so easily drew from multiple genres. As he revealed in a recent interview, Rounds was comprised entirely of samples. But that he draws from the most arcane source material available speaks to Hebden’s touch; on Rounds, his obscure sources serve the overall poignancy of the music. So while “She Moves She” retains the crisp snare and hi-hat work that underpinned millennial R&B productions, it’s the twinkling glockenspiel line that gives the track its emotional heft. Same for the harp line that intermingles with the iron lung beat of “My Angel Rocks Back and Forth.” Sampledelic or not, Four Tet’s music feels personal rather than patchwork.
The media catchphrase for mixing the pastoral airs of folk music with electronic music’s low-end became “folktronica,” a term Hebden detested and kicked against with each subsequent release. He embraced the fiery, brassy tones of spiritual jazz for his follow-up Everything Ecstatic and soon after began collaborating in earnest with free jazz drummer Steve Reid (while also producing for folk-jazz-noise-nonsense freewheelers Sunburned Hand of the Man). And when that generation-gap crossing collaboration ended with Reid’s passing in 2010, Hebden dove headfirst into modern dance music, taking in two-step, jungle, dubstep, techno and house, reconfiguring these heavier rhythms into something suiting his own manner. And as Pink recently showed, Four Tet’s knack for instantly-identifiable melody remains undiluted, no matter how strong and dancefloor-filling his new tracks are.
While touring for Rounds, Hebden began to slough off the “folk” tag of his live shows, pushing at the parameters of what a laptop could do onstage. The bonus disc on this 10th anniversary edition of Rounds reveals him at the height of his powers. Recorded live in Copenhagen, it finds Hebden taking the melodies and beanie-nodding rhythms of Rounds further and further out into the cosmos. “She Moves She” dilates from four to 10 minutes, with Hebden finding new pockets of space amid the string twangs and kick to add skittering samples and blurs of noise. A metallophone sample similarly gets rubberbanded-- at times resounding like a Balinese gamelan orchestra, other times flickering in even patterns like Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians-- before turning into “Spirit Fingers”.
The most astounding transformation occurs on “As Serious As Your Life”. The track’s taut drum break suddenly has Tibetan chimes, ghost notes, scraped strings, and electroacoustic gurgles mingle with its snare and hi-hat before the recognizable part of the song drops. But soon Hebden mutates it into a 15-minute monster that gobbles up every single genre tag in the process, until it’s a dervish of noise. As the original album proved and this reissue reinforces, Four Tet showed a new generation of listeners that much like 60s jazz before him-- which could embody soul, gospel, blues and primal howls while still sounding like “The New Thing”-- 21st century laptop music could be as serious as your life, too.
SOURCE: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18050-four-tet-rounds/
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Available in:
Rounds is the third solo album by British electronic musician Kieran Hebden, released under his alias Four Tet on 5 May 2003 by Domino Recording Company. Wanting to make a more personal record, Hebden recorded and produced the album in his North London flat over ten months using a desktop computer and a home hi-fi system. Its ten tracks feature elements of hip-hop, jazz and folk; apart from a guitar part recorded for "Slow Jam", the music is composed from between 200 and 300 samples, many processed beyond recognition.
Rounds produced two singles and one EP. Critics praised its unique fusion of electronic and organic styles, and Metacritic lists it as the fourth best-reviewed album of 2003. Several publications included Rounds on "best albums of the decade" lists. In May 2013, on the tenth anniversary of its release, Domino reissued Rounds with a bonus disc including a 2004 live performance.
Background and recording
After being a member of Fridge since 1995, Kieran Hebden began releasing solo records under the name Four Tet in 1998. His first release was the "Thirtysixtwentyfive" single, followed by the albums Dialogue in 1999 and Pause in 2001. The albums were influenced by hip-hop, jazz and electronic music. Hebden felt his output had sounded too much like his influences and wanted to make a record that was more personal and harder to define. He drew on influences including Pete Rock, DJ Premier, Jim O'Rourke, Timbaland, the Neptunes and Rodney Jerkins.
Hebden recorded Rounds over ten months in his North London flat, using a desktop computer and a home hi-fi system. With the exception of a guitar part recorded for "Slow Jam", he composed the music exclusively from a file of samples he had assembled over several years. The album uses between 200 and 300 samples; each song is built from between 20 and 30 samples heavily processed with the software packages AudioMulch and Cool Edit Pro, in many cases beyond recognition. The nine-minute track "Unspoken" was originally based on a sample from the Tori Amos song "Winter" but was reworked when Hebden failed to get sample clearance. Hebden also used a Creative Labs microphone to record the guitar part for "Slow Jam" and some sounds from television and sequenced the results in Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.
After spending the early part of his career naming his songs with random words, Hebden decided to use more meaningful titles. "As Serious as Your Life" takes its name from a 1977 Val Wilmer book about free jazz in New York City. Hebden was given a copy of the book by his father and said "I did hope that some kid would get interested and ask what the title was and then check out the book, so it's a bit like leaving little trails for people." He was inspired to title the album Rounds after hearing that his sister had been singing a musical round, telling an interviewer: "It seemed totally relevant; a round is all about repetition and phasing, which is the essence of what I've been doing since I've been making music."
Music
Kieran Hebden produced Rounds almost entirely from heavily processed samples.
Rounds contains ten instrumental tracks with a total running time of 45 minutes, which Colin Joyce of Spin called a "folktronica tapestry." Clash noted that Four Tet helped pioneer the folktronica genre with Pause and Rounds. Sound on Sound writer Sam Inglis said that the album was a "blend of fragile acoustic fragments, brutal beats and glitchy electronica"; The Age described it as "electronic music that sounds deceptively organic." Guardian critic David Peschek, who noted the influence of hip-hop, R&B and folk music, wrote that "Rounds invents its own dizzying, unlikely genres." John Bush of AllMusic found the album contained elements of electronic and experimental music combined with "a dreamy melodicism sure to endear it to indie pop fans." Dusted critic Michael Crumsho noticed the influence of folk and jazz, writing that Hebden had "taken his earlier nods to other specific genres and turned them into something wholly his own." PopMatters' Adrien Begrand noted how "Hebden shifts the focus from hip-hop beats, jazz influences, and far-reaching sonic adventurousness, to a more spare, focused sound" that contributed to Rounds' original sound. Nick Southall, in his review for Stylus magazine, stated that "it is more of the same, but 'the same' for Four Tet is perpetual evolution and motion."
"Unspoken" was named by several critics as the album's centrepiece; Begrand described it as "virtuosic laptop music". NME critic Tony Naylor thought that "As Serious as Your Life" was one of the album's more straightforward songs. The album's closing track, "Slow Jam", which Pitchfork reviewer Andy Beta said "has that long goodbye of the best melancholy closers," was described by Begrand as a "warm, wide-eyed, watching-the-sun-rise song" that features chiming guitars and a sample of a child's squeaky toy.
User Album Review
he year 2003 was a heady one for listening. On computers in the post-Napster landscape, guitar-rock intermingled with avant-garde classical music as well as “clicks’n’cuts,” which in turn could mix with twee indie rock and the thumps of backpack rap. After Kid A, analog components could fuck with guitars and laptops and soon a slew of new artists were pushing beyond these genre distinctions: DFA’s discopunk was already afoot, Jim O’Rourke had morphed from resplendent indie-pop fingerpicker to laptop noisenik, a producer from Florida named Diplo was mashing together heavy psychedelic rock breaks into something for rap heads, while underground hip-hop was getting strange and musty thanks to Madlib’s myriad personas.
The Class of 2003 also offered up three upcoming producers who embraced every sound on their hard drives and within one month that year, they all released their breakthrough efforts. There was Prefuse 73’s One Word Extinguisher, the soon-to-be-renamed-Caribou’s Up in Flames, and Four Tet's Rounds. The first melded IDM’s glitches to backpacker breaks while the second mashed it to psychedelic sunshine pop; Rounds, the third album for Kieran Hebden's project, grabbed at all of the above while also including jazz and folk. For the listeners out there who knew Hebden from his days in instrumental post-rock outfit Fridge and who might have considered his early recordings under the name of Four Tet as more of a side attraction than main gig, Rounds announced the arrival of one of electronic music’s vanguard producers.
The album opened with a recording of a dog’s heartbeat before Hebden lets it bloom into free meter drum rolls that evoked the amoebic pulses that defined late 60s experimental jazz before tightening it all up with a beat that headnodded at hip-hop without quite being beholden to it. That three distinct rhythms (cardiac, jazz, hip-hop) could effortlessly convene on “Hands” augured Hebden’s formidable beat skills, which even in the present tense pull from house, 2-step, Afrobeat, and dubstep while remaining singular.
It makes sense that Hebden so easily drew from multiple genres. As he revealed in a recent interview, Rounds was comprised entirely of samples. But that he draws from the most arcane source material available speaks to Hebden’s touch; on Rounds, his obscure sources serve the overall poignancy of the music. So while “She Moves She” retains the crisp snare and hi-hat work that underpinned millennial R&B productions, it’s the twinkling glockenspiel line that gives the track its emotional heft. Same for the harp line that intermingles with the iron lung beat of “My Angel Rocks Back and Forth.” Sampledelic or not, Four Tet’s music feels personal rather than patchwork.
The media catchphrase for mixing the pastoral airs of folk music with electronic music’s low-end became “folktronica,” a term Hebden detested and kicked against with each subsequent release. He embraced the fiery, brassy tones of spiritual jazz for his follow-up Everything Ecstatic and soon after began collaborating in earnest with free jazz drummer Steve Reid (while also producing for folk-jazz-noise-nonsense freewheelers Sunburned Hand of the Man). And when that generation-gap crossing collaboration ended with Reid’s passing in 2010, Hebden dove headfirst into modern dance music, taking in two-step, jungle, dubstep, techno and house, reconfiguring these heavier rhythms into something suiting his own manner. And as Pink recently showed, Four Tet’s knack for instantly-identifiable melody remains undiluted, no matter how strong and dancefloor-filling his new tracks are.
While touring for Rounds, Hebden began to slough off the “folk” tag of his live shows, pushing at the parameters of what a laptop could do onstage. The bonus disc on this 10th anniversary edition of Rounds reveals him at the height of his powers. Recorded live in Copenhagen, it finds Hebden taking the melodies and beanie-nodding rhythms of Rounds further and further out into the cosmos. “She Moves She” dilates from four to 10 minutes, with Hebden finding new pockets of space amid the string twangs and kick to add skittering samples and blurs of noise. A metallophone sample similarly gets rubberbanded-- at times resounding like a Balinese gamelan orchestra, other times flickering in even patterns like Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians-- before turning into “Spirit Fingers”.
The most astounding transformation occurs on “As Serious As Your Life”. The track’s taut drum break suddenly has Tibetan chimes, ghost notes, scraped strings, and electroacoustic gurgles mingle with its snare and hi-hat before the recognizable part of the song drops. But soon Hebden mutates it into a 15-minute monster that gobbles up every single genre tag in the process, until it’s a dervish of noise. As the original album proved and this reissue reinforces, Four Tet showed a new generation of listeners that much like 60s jazz before him-- which could embody soul, gospel, blues and primal howls while still sounding like “The New Thing”-- 21st century laptop music could be as serious as your life, too.
SOURCE: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18050-four-tet-rounds/
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