Rounds

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.