Taking Me On

Four Tet “Baby”

Over the past decade or so Kieran Hebden has emerged as the master of the chopped and decontextualized vocal sample. His approach is both melodic and painterly, applying snippets of voice to the area of the song with both precise intention and gestural grace. He’s never trying to hide the nature of what he’s doing – you can always tell it’s cut up and digitally edited – but the sound is never about the process, it’s entirely about feeling and abstraction. “Baby,” a new song made in collaboration with the singer Ellie Goulding, is a particularly strong iteration on his usual formula and adds an unusual dimension to a Four Tet song in allowing the listener to recognize and fixate on the voice of a pop star. It feels slightly transgressive to separate a pop vocal from clarity and meaning, and to reduce Goulding to just the particular sound of her voice. In doing this Hebden highlights the best aspects of Goulding – the specific brightness of her tone, the way she often sounds like she’s grasping for something, the way she sounds like she’s pushing herself through painful feelings. In framing her voice like this, he’s presenting a very flattering portrait of her as a singer.

Buy it from Bandcamp.