Please Don’t Do It

KH “Only Human”

This is Kieran Hebden, or Four Tet. You might have noticed that just by hearing it. The beat is a bit more thumping and aggressive than he usually gets, but the approach to slicing up and reconfiguring a vocal sample is extremely Four Tet. As far as I’m concerned, there are very few producers on par with Hebden when it comes to manipulating vocal samples. There’s a subtlety to his style – it’s never merely just about bending a sample into a hook and matching a tempo, it’s more a lead line in a dense arrangement. He plays around with time and phase, and focuses on the emotion in a voice rather than lyrics. “Only Human” is a bit of an outlier for him in the sense that more of the lyrical content is legible to the ear, but even with that it’s more abstracted than something than a pop vocal that’s meant to be clearly understood. It’s more about the movement, like this mad spiral spinning through this otherwise clean and orderly composition.

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