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	FOUR TET DANCING IN YOUR HEAD

In a recent interview with PopMatters, Kieran Hebden, the British laptop auteur who goes by the name Four Tet, compared his live show with DJing. It’s an apt analogy — at the MFA a week ago last Wednesday, Hebden hunched over two computers and a mixer, twiddled knobs, slid faders, and switched between mouses the way a turntablist would between records. The major difference, one that threatened to ruin an aurally impressive performance, was that the audience wasn’t dancing or even standing. Rather, folks found themselves sitting silently in the clinical confines of the MFA’s Remis Auditorium (bad weather caused this "Concert in the Courtyard" to be brought inside), a scattered few nodding along politely.

Aside from his understated head bobbing, there wasn’t much to look at as Hebden layered buzzes and bleats over electronic beats, building from simple patterns or spacy ambiance to cacophonous mindfucks, only to shrink it back down again. The Remis’s sound system was nothing to scoff at, but it was also nothing you couldn’t find at a good dance club. It often seemed that Hebden was chopping up beats and inserting improvisational flourishes because it was a "show," and no showman would just stand on stage and drop a needle on a record.

The best bits came when he sat back and let the music go. Weaving together hip-hop beats, experimental noise collages, dubby drum ’n’ bass, and mid-tempo IDM rhythms, he created a soundscape that formed and transformed until it was sometimes difficult to tell when one song ended and another began. For the closer, "My Angel Rocks Back and Forth," from 2003’s Rounds (Domino), he folded the melody over onto itself again and again, like schoolchildren singing in rounds, until the room was awash in harmony. He then brought everything down to a low rumble, with just the residue of the melody lingering in the air, before cutting the sound and walking off stage.