Free jazz drummer Milford Graves has a nice trick that he performs at his shows: He brings someone in the audience up on stage and asks them to feel for his heart rate. It starts out steady, but as the person holds both wrists, it slows, and Graves begins to diverge his bloodstream on either side of his body, finally achieving an internal polyrhythmic pulse between the two points. Then he jumps behind his kit and clatters away in ecstasy.
Four Tet's lone member, Kieran Hebden, is fascinated with the impossible rhythms that the free-form jazz greats could bang out as they pleased. Whether or not he's taking a page out of Milford Graves' book is debatable, but he opens "Hands" with a cardiac sample fibrillating into a multi-limbed percussive rattle of densely edited and seemingly random drum hit samples that just starts to stroke Barry Altschul's beard before locking down into a hip-hop groove. He fades the cymbals' sizzles into the pseudo-Clyde Stubblefield sticks of "She Moves She", a cycling song evenly spaced with wheeling rimshots, scattered gongs, and funky string plucks that veer around the car horns that bleat past.
"My Angel Rocks Back and Forth" gently blows iron-lung sighs through ride cymbals and dirty, run-out grooves while an austere piano twinkles, hinting at the sort of gentle sounds Hebden will soon weave around English folk legend Vashti Bunyan. Verging on the lugubrious is the nine-minute "Unspoken" (whose piano riff is lifted from, of all sources, Tori Amos' "Winter"), but Hebden's touch keeps it from morass. Here, he controls his ingredients-- fictitious soundbytes of early Gato Barbieri sax, a plaintive finger or two from McCoy Tyner, broken chimes, backwards feedback, and a DJ Shadow kickdrum-- keeping them at a contemplative simmer, rather than allowing them to come to a full boil.
"Chia" is a tabla-bubbling conduit to the mod bass and shimmying sitar of "As Serious as Your Life", namechecking the crucial free-jazz text by Val Wilmer, yet standing much closer to Miles Davis' On the Corner, with those odd-metered handclaps and that stuttering punch of a Jack DeJohnette hi-hat. With metallophone ripples at a wake, "And They All Look Broken Hearted" is an abstract and solemn affair, recalling the oddly melodic cadence of a player like Bobby Hutcherson, and with spliced drum solos swirling around some affected harpsichord and vibraphones like club smoke, Hebden captures the cool sadness of old Blue Note posters. It sounds like a shoo-in for the album's closing track, but it instead leads up to "Slow Jam", which has that long goodbye of the best melancholy closers, a circle game of echoing footsteps, fitful static, gleeful kazoos, lulling guitar repetitions, and shadows surely sinking in, revolving all disparate sounds to resolution.
Freely moving in and out of cycles, able to coalesce or evanesce in a heartbeat, straight up and down, or else banging about like a toddler on the pot shelf, Rounds funnels every element through the drum, which always remains at the forefront of the mix. But what gives this record its internal order, and allows it to stand out against previous laptop explorations of immense record collections, is the other genres Hebden dabbles in and draws upon to flesh out the beat. Though hardly obvious the first time through, there's the supple, propulsive fun of funk, as well as the pastoral placidity of folk, both moving over the cut-up rhythms like cumulous clouds, allowing hot light through at some junctures, but cooling things out with a darker umbrage in others. Rounds may not be "as serious as your life," as one track proclaims, but it does feel that pulse. (Pitchfork Media)
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