Thursday 10/11/05 Four Tet, Explosions In The Sky, Kid Koala, Faust @ Hammersmith Palais, London

The plush surroundings of the Hammersmith Palais tonight play host to a backpacker’s wet dream of leftfield music not bound by genre definition, all handpicked by the headliner, Four Tet aka Kieran Hebden. First up are Faust, who bring with them the best stage-show of the night, if little else. Sonically they jerk from strange accapella yelps to more-spaced-out-than-Spiritualized ambience, droning power chords to sensitive melodies, and it all seems a tad patchwork really. Their own personal take on extreme ironing provides much greater entertainment, with the frontman indulging in a spot of the housewives favourite whilst his band mate ploughs into chunks of metal with an angle grinder, surely sending sparks over that lovely clean sweater. While their music may not have been memorable, Faust at least did a good job of not being forgotten.

Next up is Kid Koala, known for his particularly scratch-heavy style of making music, and therefore expected to deliver a feast for the cut-up fiends in the crowd. Only he doesn’t, and instead opts for playing out a really random selection of tunes, doing the odd spot of scratching over the top, and generally not having a lot of point to his performance. It all goes a bit too bizarre when he drops Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Killing In The Name’, and, well, just plays it, before switching to another random hip-hop tune. Everyone’s left a bit confused at the end of his set, having waited for the proper turntable trickery to start and instead getting a patchy DJ set.

Thankfully Explosions In The Sky pick up the quality of the night to where it should be, coming on to a heroes welcome and launching without too much fuss into their moving post-rock landscapes. The name on most people’s lips throughout is Mogwai, which is understandable as Explosions definitely come from the school of quiet-louder-deafening songwriting, but they do it without treading too much on the toes of their Scottish counterparts. Where on record the group can come off as the lighter side of this style, live they fill out the gaps in their sound, and the fury with which they attack their instruments by the end of the set is testament to that.

After the breakthrough in 2003 of ‘Rounds’, Four Tet’s folk-inflected electronica has been thrown open to an audience previously unexposed to the avant-garde noodlings that can be found in the darker depths of his records. This sensibility is even more obvious on new album ‘Everything Ecstatic’, which doesn’t seem to have lost him any friends judging by tonight’s turnout and the reception he gets when he appears behind his rack of machines and laptops.

Abstract hissing and fizzing fills the speakers, and Kieran is hunched over his equipment, eyes fixed crazily on the banks of dials and switches, tweaking all manner out of distortion out of this box in front of him, and it seems to floating meaninglessly through the main room of the venue, until a familiar sample creeps in and slowly but surely ‘Hands’, the opening track from ‘Rounds’, appears out of the meleé. The fractured drum beat skitters around the mellow key tones, and the whole crowd sighs in unison as the music comes together.

That pretty much sets the tone for the night, where familiar cuts from the last two Four Tet albums fade in and out of the chaotic noise built up around the tunes. There are points where the noodling itself turns into improvised music with a throbbing heart, as on ‘Turtle Turtle Up’ where the dark watery beats eventually lead to a pounding techno rhythm that ends up somewhere industrial, about as far from textbook Four Tet as you can get. The moments in between songs can get a little tedious as he seems to entertain himself with the noises he makes, but the crushing beauty with which he can drop in a beat and melody completely justifies the downtime.

There are many moments in this set where you can almost forget that the Four Tet sound is defined by acoustic samples and soothing melodies, and instead an insane electronic monster chewing drum machines springs to mind, and maybe that’s kind of the point with seeing electronic music performed live. The possibilities are huge for what can be produced, and as such the opportunity to experiment and confound expectations is never easier than in the situation Kieran Hebden is in tonight. He takes full advantage of this, and as such when he finishes his encore in a wall of pounding beats and arrhythmical bleeps and squiggles, he can be rest assured that he kept his fans tonight without having to pander to convention.

Photos by: Simon Leak