Pitchfork

Summer 2007 is shaping up to be quite busy for Kieran Hebden. Surprise, surprise. Is this guy ever not busy?

In addition to touring with percussionist Steve Reid in support of their latest collaborative record Tongues and remixing the stars under his Four Tet alias, Hebden has two new albums due on shelves in the coming months.

The Sun, out June 19 on CD and LP on Temporary Residence in the U.S. (and on Text in the UK and Domino in Europe), is the years-in-the-making new album from Fridge, Hebden's band with bassist Adem Ilhan and drummer Sam Jeffers. The follow-up to 2001's Happiness, The Sun features ten songs ranging in length from 38 seconds to almost eight minutes. Post-rock-tastic! (Temporary Residence plans to reissue Happiness on limited edition double LP in celebration of the occasion.)

As Jeffers told Pitchfork in an earlier interview, Fridge's new music features "a stronger strain of improvisation and 'freeness' running through it than ever before. Maybe even a contrast between some quite tight, rhythmical stuff, and loose, no-rules music-- often in the same track."

And speaking of improvisation and freeness, in August, Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound will release Fire Escape, a collaboration between Hebden and freak/folk/avant/noise troupe Sunburned Hand of the Man. Sunburned spent four hours in the London studio the Exchange last year, following Hebden's lead as he arranged the amorphous band into different subsets. Hebden made suggestions for what the band played, and they improvised from those suggestions. Hebden then reassembled and remixed an album from tracks of those session.

Sunburned co-founder John Moloney explained to Pitchfork, "He would be like, 'I want two of you guys: Play drums and bass now. Everyone play flutes now. All vocals. OK, a couple of piano pieces. It's a bit like our older stuff, crossed with a Can record or a dance record. It's pretty cool."

Hebden agreed: "I was surprised that it came out sounding quite a bit like 23 Skidoo or Cabaret Voltaire. I think there's music in there that you could play in a club, which is an interesting twist on what they're doing." As such, two as-yet-unnamed DJs will also release 12" remixes of the material as singles on Smalltown Supersound.

The genesis of the Four Tet/Sunburned partnership lies in an August 2003 cover story of The Wire magazine, which touted Sunburned Hand of the Man as leaders of the "New Weird America." That essay sent Hebden searching for Sunburned records, and he's been a fan ever since. He asked them to tour with him in 2004, and by all accounts, the pairing of such distinct sounds worked well nightly.

Moloney explained that the team-up worked simply because of how enthusiastic both Sunburned and Hebden are about sound. "All the Four Tet records are basically what we've been doing as a ten-piece band done by one guy," Moloney said. "Just playing whatever he feels like playing, whatever he likes. Kieran is definitely a bigger fan of music than anyone I know. He just listens to records all of the time."

"After [the 2005 Four Tet album] Everything Ecstatic came out and I did quite a bit of touring on it, I remember hitting the end and playing big shows and thinking to myself, 'This is incredible,'" said Hebden. "But I also was thinking, 'I have to push myself more now.' I had done three albums, and I was in kind of a pattern. I needed to make sure I was doing something that put me in more unexpected musical situations."

The Sun tracklist:

01 The Sun
02 Clocks
03 Our Place in This
04 Drums of Life
05 Eyelids
06 Oram
07 Comets
08 Insects
09 Lost Time
10 Years and Years and Years...

Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid dates:

07-02 Calgary, Alberta - Broken City
07-06 Toronto, Ontario - Harbourfront Centre
07-08 New York, NY - Webster Hall *

* with Tortoise

Four Tet date:

04-19 Surrey, England - Farnham Maltings *

* with Caribou DJ set