Another excerpt... and Portishead on Jimmy Fallon

With the Dummy book on its way to stores right now, there is another short excerpt up on the 33 1/3 blog for your reading pleasure.

Portishead are on tour at the moment, and made their first US television appearance in over a decade on Jimmy Fallon last night, where they performed "Chase the Tear" -- the single released in 2009 in support of Amnesty International -- and a version of "Mysterons". The book argues that Portishead have always been a band dedicated to sonic unrest, in spite of the perception of Dummy as easy-listening background music. Listen to the second half of this performance and you can hear that inclination rip through the song:

Introducing Portishead's Dummy, a 33 1/3 Book

Isolation. Desire. Narcotic. Memory. Shock. Intimacy. Imagination. Solitude. Alienation. Consolation. Truth. Loss. Siren. Lullaby. Nostalgia. Grief. Companion. Lust. Lubricant. Hallucinogen. Essence. Temptress. Perfection. Loneliness. Seduction. Vindication. Depression. Distance. Reconciliation.

portishead-dummy

Portishead's 1994 album Dummy reassembles itself with every listen and with each listener. It becomes, cumulatively and collectively, a sequence of perfect meditations on loneliness and solitude; it carries promises of the narcotizing power of love; it serenades the anonymous consolations of the night; it rhapsodizes the unmooring influence upon the soul of unrequited and obsessive desire.

Dummy is irresistibly intimate, stylistically eclectic. A mixture of influences drawn from hip-hop, rock, jazz, folk, soul, funk, blues, and elsewhere, the album is a sparsely woven tapestry of sounds striped from their origins -- shards of lyrics, samples, gestures, surfaces, textures. It is held together only by inertia and by the force of the memories, impressions, and perceptions it provokes in the listener -- only to fall away undone and unresolved into darkness.

An entry in Continuum's 33 1/3 series, Portishead's Dummy will be published in 2011.

I'm looking for stories about this music. What were you doing when you first heard it? How did it change your life? How has listening to it changed the way that you thought about what music could do?

We live in a world where music is infinitely distributable, ubiquitous in its presence, contextless in conception and reception. Music lives and dies in a place of continuous reinterpretation by its listeners.

What does Dummy mean to you?

NXNE

Coverage of NXNE over at PopMatters, edited by yours truly. Includes a piece on the festival’s film content:

Nostalgia is the dominant emotion in much filmmaking about music. The primary impulse of many biopics, musicals, and documentaries is to memorialize music or musicians who have had a significant impact on the filmmaker’s life. Too often this has its own dangers: the rare biopic that does not sag with pacing problems suffers because it cannot establish any critical distance from its subject. But the mode can be uncannily beautiful — from the elegiac rhythms of, say, Clint Eastwood’s Bird, or the smoke-filled purism of Robert Altman’s Kansas City.


And a trawl of various music acts. Highlights were BC’s No Luck Club and Toronto’s Holy Fuck:

Holy Fuck are reductionists, intent on marshaling the squeals and protests of equipment designed for other purposes. At the Reverb, the audience comprised the would-be-hip and the professionally curious. It was a brilliant set, but only a few people got it. Much of the audience seemed more concerned with impressing the other people there. It was an elitist crowd, brought by the Now magazine showcase, of which Holy Fuck were the fourth act. Downstairs from the intimacy of Holy Joe’s, the Reverb has something of the church about it, and something of the thoroughfare. Its high ceilings produce great sound, showering shards of noise back to the audience along with drips of condensation from the air conditioning, a venue in which a dropped glass produces a shatter rather than a smothered crunch. But the utilitarian design — the traffic to the bar and the washrooms and the exits runs along the back — means that until an act is truly engrossing, it feels contingent. There is little to keep you there; you could be listening to another act upstairs (or downstairs, at the Kathedral) within moments, or out on the street. It does not ask anything of audience. It does not require you to commit. You have to want to be there, and you have to want to stay.

Profile of M.I.A.

An extended interview/profile up on PopMatters:

“Sunshower” has been sampled for almost 20 years now; there’s a snatch of its warped Hawaiian guitars and splintered percussion towards the end of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It?”, but like attempts by De La Soul and Doug E. Fresh, it’s just dressing. The appropriations always seem piecemeal and placeless: Busta Rhymes’ “Take It Off” is slick, but not convincing. Ghostface Killah’s “Ghost Showers” attempts to wholly inhabit the song; it swallows him whole. There’s simply too much in the original: swooping Hawaiian guitars, child-like chants, ambient noise, guitar barely recognizable in a flood of in reverb. The percussion is so richly syncopated, so densely layered, that it leaves Daye’s vocal somehow isolated, exposed, as if shimmering in a cloud of dust. The melody itself sounds free and ungrounded, and takes on an almost atonal quality. The groove is woodlike, organic, pulmonary. Nobody has done anything as remotely convincing, assured, or unique with the same materials. Until M.I.A.‘s “Sunshowers”.

The difference between the original and M.I.A.‘s second single, produced last year by Steve Mackey and Ross Orton, is more than one of genre or period; it is a difference in aesthetics, a difference in the place given to popular culture. The original material itself is gutted. The slightly adrenaline bliss of Davy’s chorus sounds highly phased, over-exposed, washed-out at the edges. A percussive bass glissandi, which in the original gracefully eases the song into a final elaboration of the chorus, is ripped out and looped throughout the piece. The groove is a relentless throb that hammers its way throughout the entire song, rattling and lurching between violence and grace. “Sunshowers” erases the spirit of the original as it goes along.

Where Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band brought a wispy lyricism to disco, a feeling of dreamy nostalgia wrapped in their elaborate big band arrangements, M.I.A.‘s use of the song is—like the rest of her material—a blend of hard unsentimentally and poplike glee. It’s a striking contrast: strident political stances sit alongside made-for-ringtone hooks. There’s no middle ground on Arular, her debut album. Even the wordplay is taken to a level of abstraction, with playground chants in place of intimacy and wit. There is very little that deals with the minutiae of personal relationships; even “URAQT”, a song about betrayal, revolves more around the exchange of postures than of emotions. Relationships are almost transactions. There is no trust in this music.

Update: Now picked up by AlterNet.

Nostalgia 77: The Garden

Review at PopMatters:

If any of this material feels like pastiche, it is nevertheless very well done. There is just enough hip-hop to keep things grounded: the breaks at the start of “Freedom” have a pedigree that goes back to Mantronix. The attention to period texture is particularly refreshing, given the tide of neo-jazz schlock that is increasingly upon us: Riaan Volsoo’s bass is recorded with a wonderfully acoustic rattle and throb; Kelsey Jones’s trumpet and Jon Shenoy’s sax have a up-close spittle to match the density of the arrangements. Above all, the tracks themselves have a purpose that is typically missing from the worthiness of hard-bop revivalism or the meandering of jazz-influenced hip-hop. This is a solid meal, even if you can still pick out the ingredients.


 

Buck 65: This Right Here is Buck 65

Review running in the lead spot on PopMatters:

Terfry shows no sign of slowing down: a sequel to Talkin’ Honky Blues is due this year. His appeal isn’t just in the wedding of hip-hop to the American folk tradition; other artists from Beck to Timbaland have taken respectable shots into that acoustic barrel. Buck 65 is doing something more ambitious: reading a tradition of American storytelling through hip-hop. The expansive, inclusive, digressive American voice that runs through Guthrie and Dylan (and stretches back to Whitman) doesn’t sound out of place for a Canadian like Buck 65, any more than it did for Kerouac. Terfry has some of Mark Twain’s frontier nostalgia (his concert tall tales about Pythagoras’s fear of beanfields suggests a sure grasp of Twain’s sense of humor). Where he takes this ambition next will be fascinating to hear. This release is a pretty good summary of what he’s been up to so far.

GB: Soundtrack for Sunrise

Review of GB’s Soundtrack for Sunrise at PopMatters:

In general, what distinguishes the treatment of vocals in the garage-influenced genres is a willingness to let the production flex around the shape of the song. On one hand, this means that a vocal is not—as in much recent R&B—gridlocked by beats; it allows a song to rise and fall, rather than simply stop and start. Where the material is weak, though, it over-exposes the smoothness of the vocal delivery and the paucity of melodic construction.

Massive Attack: Danny the Dog OST

Review up at PopMatters:

There has always been an unusual feeling of space at the center of Massive Attack’s sound, as if the music was somehow adjacent to its own emotional core. Even in their most brilliant work—Shara Nelson’s voice clearing a path through the ragged and magnificent string arrangements of “Unfinished Sympathy”—the music’s heart feels somehow misplaced. What remains is a hole that perfectly suggests a forlorn and radiant lovesickness. Their work isn’t as much a reproduction of grief or loss or anger or rapture, as it is a series of perfect, and perfectly evocative, outlines. For all the emotional gravity that their better songs bring to bear, it is an effect that is accrued, rather than immediately impressed. The effect is as disorientating as it is unique.

Jimmy Behan: Days Are What We Live In

Album review of Jimmy Behan’s Days Are What We Live In at PopMatters:

Behan has supported Four Tet and Manitoba on tour, and shares much of the sonic vocabulary of “folktronica”. Days Are What We Live In has a crisp, clear upper mid-range; spare, sparse piano and keyboard figures dominate. There are the same splintered fractions of guitar licks and reversed fragments of sound that Four Tet has made its own. The album’s lower range is generally filled with warm, throbbing sounds; the effect should be hypnotic, cumulative. Drum sounds, when used, punctuate the shimmering structure.

And:

There are moments of great prettiness here. They remain opaque, which is both frustrating and quite deliberate: this music is all surface. It is meticulous, measured, finely-crafted. If it fails to move or arouse, that is as much a feature of the genre as it is a failing of imagination.

DJ Nu-Mark — Hands On; DJ Nu-Mark & Pomo — Blend Crafters Volume One

To get the ball rolling: 2004 was a great year for Jurassic 5 solo releases. Next year is going to be pretty good too — more on that later — but the highlights were certainly DJ Nu-Mark’s two projects.

Hands On was the increasingly obligatory ‘I have an album coming out’ mixtape, except that it was also an official release on Sequence Records, which brought us Automator’s Wanna Buy A Monkey? and Babu’s two DuckSeason releases.

Hands On opens with some unselfconscious funk, including Organized Konfusion’s JBs-sampling “Fudge Funk”, and Rex Brown Company’s unrestrained clavinet workout “Hot Track”. (Clavinet: “the funkiest instrument known to man”?) A handful of Beatnuts- and Premier-produced skits and intros precede a slab of red-hot US hip-hop. There’s a guest spot by fellow J5 member Chali 2na. “Saliva”, the best track from Viktor Vaughn’s Vaudeville Villain, is produced by Rjd2 in Deadringer mode. And there’s Vitamin-D’s “No Good”: think you’re sick of sped-up vocal samples? Hear this.

Among the album’s highlights is the stretch of international hip-hop towards the end. There’s still something disconcerting about hearing a properly-practiced non-American flow; the accents fall across the beats in ways slightly — and therefore illuminatingly — different. Even MCs with a distinctively London delivery still stand out (on the other hand, there’s nothing more bland than a UK MC aping American delivery). But that’s nothing compared to the novelty of French, German and Aussie cadences and rhythms here. And there’s All Time High’s Ayrshire brogue, which I imagine must be unintelligable to the majority of listeners. Excellent.

Like Hands On, Blend Crafters is back-to-back crisp breakbeats and muscular basslines. The first track — “Melody” — is featured on Hands On. It’s a taut jam built around a stack of overlapping baritone vocal samples and a phat snare sound. “Lola” similarly stacks up and parcels out horn riffs. “Bad Luck Blues” takes the reedy vocal and winsome guitar riffs of Skip James’ Delta classic “Hardtime Killin’ Floor Blues”. The mechanical throb of “Shedding Skin” sounds like Chemical Brother’s “Piku”. And that’s just the first few tracks: there’s more, including a strangely touching corny piano-sax-beats cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine”. It should really say ‘EP’ on the tin, though — at 30:16 it runs a little too short.

As with Jurassic 5, there is something of the old-school about these releases: they are fun, funky, not too thoughtful, and not too self-important. They certainly more than fill the spot taken by 2003’s DJ Format/MC Abdominal collaborations.

In other J5 news, Chali 2na’s Fish Market mixtape had some high points. Cut Chemist’s Litmus Test (about half of it streamed at his official site) is a 28-minute cut-up of his best-known productions. Both of them are, presumably, efforts to soften up the market for solo albums (2na’s Fish Outta Water, Chemist’s The Audience Is Listening) due at the start of the next year. There is also a J5 album slated for May.

DJ Nu-Mark, Hands On

(Sequence, 2004)

DJ Nu-Mark & Pomo, Blend Crafters Volume One

(Up Above, 2004)

Chali 2na, Fish Market (mixed by DJ Dez)

(N/A, 2004)

Cut Chemist, The Litmus Test

(Tube, 2004)

New Portishead material?

From the Beth Gibbons mailing list:

Beth has been very busy this year taking the opportunity to work with other artists - writing the track ‘Killing Time’ for Joss Stone’s new album Mind, Body & Soul, writing and performing backing vocals on the track ‘Strange Melody’ for Jane Birkin’s new album ‘Rendez Vous’, co-writing and performing the track ‘Lonely Carousel’ with Rodrigo Leao for his new album ‘Cinema’ and co-writing the track ‘Love Is A Stranger’ with David Steel (of Fine Young Cannibals fame) for his current Fried album.

Currently in the midst of completing a film score for a French Film ‘L’Annulaire’ to be released in 2005 Beth is remarkably also finding the time to work on new tracks for Portishead!

Beth will be performing on November 20th and 21st in Lisbon and November 25th in Oporto, Portugal with Rodrigo Leao and there are unconfirmed plans for a one-off performance with Jane Birkin in Paris before the year end.


(Emphasis mine. The urge to copy-edit these things is strangely hard to resist.)

No doubt it’s just the latest in the long line of ‘they’re still working together’ rumours.

On the other hand, welcome to all those folks who are Googling for the “new Portishead album”.

Smith & Mighty — Retrospective

I’ve been meaning to write a ‘how to buy’ piece on the early Bristol sound for a little while now, but quite a few of the key early releases remain unavailable for the casual buyer. This career retrospective fills at least one gap, including as it does Fresh Four’s 1989 cover of the Rose Royce song “Wishing On A Star”.

Rob Smith and Ray Mighty helped establish the production template at the heart of the Bristol sound, pulling the melange of influences (hip-hop, dub, lovers’ rock, rare groove, soul, punk, Two-Tone ska) into something distinct and coherent. Their version of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 1” was at the heart of “Stranger Than Love”, released in 1987 by Mark Stewart, a long-time member of the Bristol scene (and associate of Adrian Sherwood’sOn-U Sound project). Along with The Wild Bunch’s “The Look Of Love” (1986), “Stranger Than Love” is considered by many the prototypical trip-hop record.

Smith & Mighty’s 1988 versions of the Bacharach/David torch songs “Walk On By” and “Anyone (Who Had A Heart)” built on “The Look Of Love”: crisp mid-80s hip-hop drum programming rivets down a wide-open arrangement that displays the dub influence; floating above is a dreamy, slightly distanced vocal track, taking full advantage of Bacharach’s airy and drifting intervals. Tim Simenon, of Bomb The Bass, was doing the same thing at the same time with “Say A Little Prayer.”

Smith & Mighty produced Massive Attack’s first single — a cover of Chaka Khan’s “Any Love” — and Fresh Four’s “Wishing On A Star”, which epitomized the formula and introduced (to ears outside Bristol) the signature muted, low-key rapping. The consequent commercial success brought a major-label record deal — with disastrous results. A series of protracted disagreements with London Records meant that Carlton’s 1991 LP The Call Is Strong was the only Smith & Mighty production released for years. In 1995 their contract expired and — with Peter D Rose — they issued Bass Is Maternal on their own More Rockers label. By that time Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, among others, had taken the Bristol sound to an international audience.

Most of Fresh Four went on to become key figures in the Bristol drum & bass scene — as, indeed, did Smith & Mighty. But the Fresh Four LP retains its reputation as the great unreleased Bristol sound album (rivaled until this year by Earthling’s Humandust). In all likelihood it doesn’t exist in any kind of completed form — but I bet there are some great masters locked up somewhere.

This is a career-spanning retrospective issued by the German !K7 label, with whom they have released two albums since 2000. Most of the material here is, inevitably, post-1995 drum & bass; most of that is from the !K7 releases. There is one track from Carlton’s The Call Is Strong, the Fresh Four single, and versions of the two central Bacharach covers (both of which are also on their highly-listenable DJ-Kicks mix).

When the BBC finally get their act together (or I’m on the p2p networks at the right time), I will finally be able to hear Smith & Mighty’s apparently epic 1996 Essential Mix.

Smith & Mighty, Retrospective

(!K7, 2004)

Smith & Mighty, DJ-Kicks

(!K7, 1998)

Boca 45, Stephanie Mckay

An update on Boca 45’s Pitch Sounds LP. You can take a listen to “In The City” courtesy of Invada Records’ audio samples. It’s not to be missed—by far the standout track on the album and possibly one of the best singles of the year. It’s built around a static chord structure, ballooning bass tones and corny 60s backing vocals. There’s a great late-summer vibe to it, with the humid, charged atmosphere lit up by Stephanie Mckay’s electric timing.

If you missed Mckay’s astonishing debut album, co-produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Earthling’s Tim Saul, grab it while you can.


Boca 45, Pitch Sounds

(Grand Central / Invada, 2004)


Boca 45, “In The City”

(High Noon, 2004)


Mckay, Mckay

(Go Beat, 2003)

Ralph Myerz and The Jack Herren Band — Your New Best Friends

The time for dull and superficial articles about the ‘Bergensound’ seems to have passed, but suffice to say that Ralph Myerz and The Jack Herren Band come from the same locale as Kings Of Convenience, Röyksopp, Magnet and numerous others. Much of their debut, A Special Album, was produced by Jørgen Træen, who owns Duper Studios in Bergen and produced both of Jaga Jazzist’s albums.

While A Special Album (following A Special EP, naturally), did not benefit from comparisons to Röyksopp’s Melody AM, it was still very solid feel-good downtempo, if a bit glossy and formulaic. It certainly matched anything by Blues States or Kinobe, and tracks like “Nikita”, “Think Twice” and “A Special Morning” were well worth the asking price (which doesn’t seem to be very high at the moment: you can’t go into a second-hand CD store in Toronto without finding a copy). It also had some of the best kitsch cover art for some time.

Your New Best Friends seems only to have had a Norwegian release thus far. The formula has become even glossier. There are moments — the chorus of “Surprise” — that remind you of what was good about A Special Album. But only a few tracks (like the churning “Dubspace”) break out of the nightclub-friendly combination of disco guitar, pop-toned bass, chirpy synth riffs and closely-harmonized backing vocals. It sounds a Jamiroquai album, in other words.

If you like albums that come with a big ‘chillout album of the month’ sticker on the front, this is for you.

If I can say that without making my disdain too obvious.

They have managed to keep up the deliberately naff cover art, though. Consistency is valuable.

Info and audio samples at Emperor Norton and MIC Norway.

Ralph Myerz And The Jack Herren Band, A Special Album

(Emperor Norton, 2003)

Ralph Myerz And The Jack Herren Band, Your New Best Friends

(Emperor Norton, 2004)

Daddy G — DJ Kicks

The latest of an absurd quantity of Bristol-related releases (with more to come), and after Four Tet’s LateNightTales, the second mixtape series contribution this month. This is the latest addition to the DJ Kicks series, mixed by Wild Bunch and Massive Attack member Daddy G (Grant Marshall).

The tracklist looks extremely promising. It should suit those who miss the humid warmth of Massive Attack’s original reggae and dub influences. There’s some great Studio One material, including the reverb-soaked beats and paving-stone bass of Willie Williams’ classic “Armagideon Time”. There’s Barrington Levy’s early dancehall hit “Here I Come”, Foxy Brown’s Maytals-sampling “Oh Yeah” and Melaaz’s French cover of Dawn Penn’s “No No No”.

Plus there’s a handful of rare Massive remixes — Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s “Mustt Mustt”, Les Negresses Vertes’ “Face A La Mer”, the ‘Napoli Trip’ remix of “Karmacoma”. Many of the Massive remixes seem to me to promise more than they deliver; those that strip the original material down to its guts (or, more usually, it’s bassline) seem to work best. I suspect that these will work very well in context, since it looks to be a remarkably consistent mix. Almost everything here features a wide, uncluttered mid-range and a thunderous bassline. In an excellent interview (it’s in English: scroll down), G recalls the Bristol scene in which the Wild Bunch came together:

We were sort of punks and stuff like that, we used to go to a lot of the reggae things and so there was a cross pollination of the reggae and punk thing at the time. So it did in Bristol actually get a lot of punks going into reggae sound systems and stuff like that. And that was a really big thing to go to a sound system and to see wall-to-wall speakers and stuff like that it was amazing. We were all into our sort of reggae at the time, so to have your stomach blown through your mouth by bass was amazing.

This mix seems designed to do the job.

There’s all kinds of other treats, including the Mos Def collaboration that appeared on the Blade 2 soundtrack, the Meter’s classic “Just Kissed My Baby” (everyone who knows EPMD’s “Never Seen Before” will have the riff hardwired into their brain). Most excitingly, there’s an early white label version of Tricky’s “Aftermath”, and the Danny Krivit remix of Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady”.

Worth looking out for.

UPDATE: Scissorkick is all over it. You can check out the very high-quality Melaaz track, and Paul Oakenfold’s remix of Massive’s peerless “Unfinished Sympathy”. In the words of Joe Cocker, it makes me wish I was home again in England.

Daddy G, DJ Kicks

(!K7, 2004)

Massive Attack — Danny The Dog

RZA’s score of Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai remains the best downtempo/abstract soundtrack. But Massive Attack’s score of Luc Besson’s film Danny The Dog is just out on Virgin, well in advance of the film’s 2005 release date. The film — also known as Unleashed — stars Jet Li as an enslaved fighter who is befriended by a blind musician (Morgan Freeman).

It is perennially hard to tell who comprises Massive Attack from one album to the next. At the moment it seems (not least from the sound of this release) that Massive Attack is currently 3-D (Robert Del Naja) and co-producer Neil Davidge, with Daddy G (Grant Marshall) remaining ‘on leave’ from active collaboration. It was the Del Naja-Davidge partnership that wrapped up 100th Window in six or seven months, after scrapping months of sessions with rock band Lupine Howl. Danny The Dog has appeared after a considerably shorter interval than divided past Massive releases.

It’s always been interesting to chart the ebb and flow of influences as successive members of Massive Attack have arrived and (mostly) departed. The charm and innocence of Lovers Rock, which informed Blue Lines, seem to have disappeared entirely with the departure of founding member Mushroom (Andrew Vowles). In Daddy G’s absence, the reggae and dub influences have taken a back seat. That left the finely chiseled — almost clinical — sound of last year’s 100th Window. While the album was more immediately accessible than 1998’s Mezzanine, it had a glassy production sheen that enhanced the feeling of claustrophobic paranoia.

Danny The Dog feels more open, though perhaps that’s in the nature of the soundtrack genre. Moody piano loops and staid string figures abound; moments of brittle prettiness in “Sam” and “Two Rocks & A Cup Of Water” veer towards generic soundtrack time-filling. On the other hand, it’s plainly a Massive release: there are drum samples so muddied that they are almost indistinguishable from one another, recalling the underwater quality of Req’s 1995 album One.

As for the influences, there remain tantalizing hints of Britain’s late-70s Two-Tone sound; the guitar riffs that open “One Thought At A Time” have some of the pace and attitude of punk but the blocky and jumpy shape of ska.

Any Massive Attack release is welcome, and this one has several moments of opaque brilliance. In any event, it’s nice to hear a step back from the closed production density of 100th Window.

There are audio samples via the Massive Attack site.

Del Naja and Davidge have also worked on the score for Saul Dibb’s film Bullet Boy. Rumours persist that Daddy G will return for the fifth studio album, to be released sometime next year. Apparently Mos Def and Tom Waits will be involved. In the meantime, there’s Daddy G’s DJ Kicks.

Massive Attack, Danny The Dog (OST)

(Virgin, 2004)

Four Tet — Late Night Tales

The avalanche of choice music available this month continues with new contributions to two long-standing mixtape series. First up is Kieran Hebden’sLate Night Tales (audio samples via Azuli). Anyone who has been listening closely won’t be surprised to learn that Hebden’s taste in jazz, folk and hip-hop strays pretty far from the mainstream of each of those genres. This collection begins eclectic and doesn’t really let up.

One of the advantages of the Late Night Tales series is that artists can put together a fairly unfiltered portrait of their influences. No doubt there’s always a little ego-stroking: the temptation to demonstrate how extensive, refined or varied is their record collection. But in general the idea works: the listener gets an accessible and fairly inexpensive sampler of music somewhat like the artist in question. Buyers of Jamiroquai’s contribution to the series get a mix of Johnny Hammond, Ramsey Lewis and Sister Sledge — exactly the kind of thing most casual fans wouldn’t otherwise hear.

And there’s usually at least one hard-to-find gem otherwise unavailable without some expensive and time-consuming crate-digging.

This kind of thing works especially well for popularizers and updaters like Jamiroquai, but for an genuinely original artist like Four Tet, it risks highlighting how much greater is what an artist makes of their influences than is the sum of the parts.

There are some wonderful highlights here, and if it boosts sales of Max Roach and Joe Henderson records even slightly, it will be a job well done. It is also plain to see from what sources Hebden draws his intricate studies of noise and space and repetition. But since most post-hard-bop jazz fans are not also Fairport Convention fans, and most Manfred Mann fans are not also Prince Paul fans, there’s a fairly high chance that there will be something here that you won’t enjoy. At all.

On the other hand, there’s Four Tet’s hypnotic dismantling of Hendrix’s “Castles Made Of Sand”, and Four Tet-esque tracks by Icarus and fellow-traveller Manitoba. David Shrigley’s hilarious “Dont’s” (‘There is no such thing as a metal frisbee’) is probably worth the asking price on its own.

“Castles Made Of Sand” is also available as a 7”, and there’s a stream online (thanks to Disquiet).

Hebden seems to come out with an album almost exactly every two years, so we’ve got a little while to wait yet. The single of “My Angel Rocks Back And Forth”, coupled with a DVD of all the Four Tet videos to date, came out on Domino a while ago.

There are also some mp3s currently available for download, including a no-sound-left-unexplored 23-minute life rendition of “As Serious As Your Life”. It may partly make up for the fact that you — like everybody I know — missed out on the limited edition Copenhagen concert release.

What we’re really missing, of course, is a collection of Four Tet remixes.

Four Tet, LateNightTales

(Azuli, 2004)

Four Tet, My Angel Rocks Back And Forth

(Domino, 2004)