You couldn't accuse Kieran Hebden, alias Four Tet, of lack of ambition. Now 25, he has already made eight albums, four as Four Tet and four more with the guitar-trio Fridge, which he joined as a teenager. Of his new album, Rounds, Hebden aims "to be an innovator, but still accessible to human beings".
The disc itself is a thing of diverse mysteries, skipping from passages of filigree delicacy created with what sound like harps, bells or mandolins (this is the guy who invented "folktronica") to interludes of devastating intensity, powered by satisfyingly meaty drum beats. Sometimes he sounds like a group of musicians playing ordinary instruments together, but elsewhere he makes you vividly aware that technique and process are central to his studio approach.
But describing exactly what Hebden is doing, and how, is made close to impossible by the abstraction of his working methods, in which everything is filtered, treated, overlapped, juxtaposed or somehow altered.
For his live show, he stands behind a table bearing two open laptop computers, starts up a beat or particular melodic fragment, then starts wreaking changes, additions and amendments. He doesn't say anything, merely offering an enigmatic smile between pieces as he swigs from a giant bottle of Evian.
The sound, which he will soon take on the road with Radiohead, doesn't have the caressing delicacy of the Rounds material, but there's a sometimes shocking physicality. With a few flicks of an invisible finger, he triggers thunderous beat barrages that set the whole room quaking and make your limbs shiver as though you're standing on the skin of an enormous drum. The force of it rushes through your hair like a raging sonic wind.
This makes you ultra-receptive to the reflective interludes that follow, as if you've been blitzed with an auditory enema. Acoustic guitars, ghost voices or ultra-clean electronic jitters suddenly seem to emanate from the centre of your own head. The audience - many looking as if they've been assembled for a scientific investigation into male-pattern hair loss - absorb all this with a kind of geeky passivity. Hebden, of course, just smiles.
