Electronic Short-Circuits: Four Tet's 'Rounds'

FOUR TET: ROUNDS

SCORE: 79/100

Four Tet's glitch-laced downtempo music is something unique and revolutionary, with this album being one of his most well recognized works of ambition.

Rounds mixes and blends many genres together, primarily feeling like downtempo IDM music with small slices of glitch, and elements of instrumental trip hop present themselves throughout. It's an album that is immediately atmospheric and quite enjoyable, and it feels like the perfect collection of instrumentals to help anyone get through a work day - focused, clear, and consistent through various soundwaves and different sonic elements that mesh, but never clash until you are expecting it the least. 

This album defies all laws of music, being composed of samples in a way where you could never tell this is a sample-based album; with many of them being so chopped, distorted, and altered that they are completely unidentifiable within the album. Two to three hundred samples were selected and used for the album, and the result is a project that is both impossible to define and entirely fluid all at once.

After compiling various different influences - with many of them being nothing alike, Hebden strived to make something that sounded completely unique, as he had felt his previous two outputs had sounded too much like he was drawing completely from his influences. This album has less influences from jazz music - but they still remain in the slow, atmospheric compositions that vary in length and style. Every song is a unique surprise, but it doesn't feel like a collection of songs at all, rather a collection through sound that makes for one wall of an album; where every song comes together in pieces to make a bigger picture.

Hebden spent years filing together samples, which led to the extensive library of them he had chosen from for this album - creating the album with his home sound system and a desktop computer. A guitar section was recorded for the tenth and final track, Slow Jam, and Hebden even went out of his way to record and capture sounds from his own television. 

Without this album, genres like folktronica would not have been pioneered as well as Hebden allowed them to be, and this album was a cornerstone in creating new niches throughout the music community, mixing various genres and creating something that almost feels like it should be without any labels; it's something that should be experienced and remarked upon. 

This is electronic at its most literal and most complex - with electrical buzzes and glitches that feel like a short circuit coming to life sonically. The sound palate is complex and full of different cords that tangle and snap, and Four Tet manages to make genius with his third album, which has stood the test of time and still sounds undoubtedly high-tech over two decades later. It's a profound look into sampling, with twenty to thirty samples making up almost every track; it isn't just an album, it's the innerworkings of sound itself.