Yield to Total Elation - Four Tet

What is the goal of an avant-garde electronic musician? To play Carnegie or Coachella? To kick Daft Punk off their glowing pyramid and change the face of dance music? To catch the ear of a music supervisor at Weiden + Kennedy and wind up scoring a Nike ad?

If this last goal was Kieran Hebden's, Four Tet would have been a success almost a decade ago. But crisscrossing joggers exercising to "Everything Is Alright" from Four Tet's second release, Pause, was not enough for Hebden. 2003's Rounds heralded a possible new future, not only for the young UK-native, but for electronic music as a genre. Rounds had a humanity about it—it is soulful without copying retro samples, distorted and unbelievably complex without devolving into noisy pretension.

And then something happened. Something changed. The wave of electronic acts that should have followed Four Tet's march into intelligent sincerity never did. Instead, the genre was sidetracked by an unlikely revival of 80's synth and 70's disco cheese. Gregg Gillis began calling himself Girl Talk and started playing short versions of songs everyone had heard before and for a couple of years, Night Ripper was the only record you'd hear at parties.

And the movement really grew. M83's career-spanning tribute to 80s soundtrack icon Vangelis sold out the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Australian act Cut Copy had to be moved to Club Nokia when the LAFD determined that the Music Box was too small for the number of fans who wanted to see them.

Four Tet performed to only about a hundred people at The Echo. But we hundred spent no time lamenting. Four Tet's recordings are so finished in their execution that it can be difficult to appreciate their true complexity. Hebden set his mind to creating the many layers one-by-one on stage, unveiling them out of sync and shuffled in with glimpses of other songs. As if on a scavenger hunt, the crowd cheered every find - the drum track from "As Serious As Your Life" or the staccato mandolin from "Spirit Fingers."

The true triumph of the night came from the piece-by-piece reconstruction of "A Smile Around The Face." The vocal tracks alone seemed to take twenty minutes to build and when Hebden hit the chorus a shout crossed The Echo like it was the final round of the World Cup; Kieren Hebden had won, Four Tet had won. For a second, it was possible to forget the wayward path of the last few years, to scream and cheer and dance.

And that, I think, should be the goal.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine