Let’s just call it the playlist. The official title of Four Tet’s long-running collection of aural inspirations and ephemera, hosted on Spotify and containing 154 hours and 36 minutes of music (so far), is a string of emojis and glitched-out ASCII characters that might crash our website if we tried to replicate it. And the current name, such as it is—a few evil eyes, some multicolored circles, a CD, a saxophone, a gymnast doing a cartwheel—is liable to change whenever the producer and DJ born Kieran Hebden decides to add a new batch of tracks, as he’s been doing a few times a month, give or take, for the last six years. Like the playlist itself, the ever-shifting title seems like a living thing, bright and vaguely fungal, growing irregularly across Spotify’s otherwise ordered surface.
When Hebden launched the playlist in 2016, it was something of a lark, a way to share the spoils of his crate-digging with whoever cared to listen. Within a few months, as it grew in audience and duration—he never deletes tracks, so it’s always getting bigger—he began taking it more seriously. Some Spotify playlists evoke a single vivid but unobtrusive mood, softly massaging the far edges of your attention while the center is occupied with dinner party conversation or lifting weights. This one is more like an ethnomusicology class, or an artwork unto itself. It asks for and earns your sustained engagement, reflecting Hebden’s vast knowledge and puckish personality in its perceptive associations between songs. At some point, for Hebden, it grew from a strictly curatorial outlet into a creative one: Scattered like easter eggs among the Detroit techno anthems and Jimi Hendrix demos are quite a few pieces of original music that he released specifically with the playlist in mind, using willfully abstruse aliases like ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ) and △▃△▓ so they’d be otherwise difficult to locate on Spotify. From my perspective, the whole thing has become nearly as important to the Four Tet canon as his actual albums.
The playlist is a rare welcoming spot in the otherwise alienating landscape of streaming: overgrown and unruly, full of strange humanity in a place where slickness and predictability are the norm. Yet it would not be possible without streaming’s access to vast amounts of history’s recorded music. I’ve been listening to it for years, at times as an idle curiosity and others as a minor obsession. Still, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. Hearing it in its entirety would take just shy of a week, without breaks. You’d start with “GL,” the raucous debut single by British-Armenian electronic producer Hagop Tchaparian, and end, six sleepless nights later, with “Earth’s Magnetic Field,” composer Charles Dodge’s 1970 attempt to render the titular force as primitive synthesizer music. Every turn in between is deeply considered—every turn I’ve encountered, anyway. It seems possible that no one knows all the playlist’s contours except Hebden himself.
Cue up any section and you’ll find at least one revelatory parallel between ostensibly unrelated music. Brandy’s “Turn It Up,” a clubby Timbaland-produced R&B song from 2004, follows “Aruca,” a nearly impenetrable wall of feedback from the obscure 1990s noise-pop band Medicine, which happens to share a slightly faster version of the same basic drum beat. On paper, the ebullient sing-raps of Starrah’s 2016 track “Rush” and the devotional arpeggios of JD Emmanuel’s 1982 new age cult-classic “Prayer” would seem to have nothing in common. Hear them one after the other and you might wonder for a moment whether Starrah hired Emmanuel as her synth player. The winding melodies of American post-bop find echoes in Malian kora music. George Harrison, the Beatle with the most pronounced interest in Indian music, rubs shoulders with Balsara & His Singing Sitars, an Indian band most famous for covering the Beatles. This is how the playlist works: leaping without prejudice between styles, decades, and continents; mixing the relatively popular and the utterly arcane; following associations that are sometimes apparent and sometimes oblique, probing your assumptions about what’s connected and what isn’t.
Hebden, who recently prevailed in a legal battle with Domino Records over streaming royalties, doesn’t often give interviews, but he agreed to discuss the playlist with me. “It would be nice to get the story out there,” he wrote in an email before our phone conversation. As such, there’s no mention of the Domino decision, which hadn’t yet been resolved when we spoke, or even about Four Tet music per se. Still, he gave me a lot to think about regarding his own work, artists’ presence on streaming, and how the relationship between recording and listener may continue to evolve going forward.
Four Tet: Just the idea of sharing music, or documenting my musical discoveries. But there’s loads of stuff I’m listening to that I don’t put on there. I want to show things that connect in some way to the music I make, that are inspiring me in my own music. I never really anticipated it turning into this ongoing project. I started it at that point in the music industry when everyone was saying to me all the time, “You really need to get on this Spotify playlist. That’s the way people are having success.” I remember being a bit irritated by it. And I just straightaway thought, I want to have my own playlist rather than begging to get on the Spotify playlist of “songs to listen to in the shower,” or whatever.
People usually discuss the problems with Spotify in terms of money and royalties, which is a whole separate issue that I don’t want to get into. The other issue, for me, which is just as pressing and still a big problem, has to do with the presentation of music. The artwork gets smaller and smaller. You can’t have proper liner notes on there. Especially for certain genres—jazz, classical, things like that—the presentation doesn’t do justice to the music. It’s ugly, it’s inconvenient. And those things have actually wound me up more than all the issues to do with money. So I was looking at Spotify with a lot of frustration, wanting to make it my own in some way. To put some sort of signal on my page to my audience that I’m trying to gain some control here. I had the idea to not give it a name, just give it these glitches, symbols, emojis. Every time there’s been an update to the playlist, the emojis and symbols change. I didn’t explain that code to anyone.
Later on, I went to Spotify and said to them, I want to have music that only appears in my playlist. Is it possible to have those sorts of exclusives? And they told me the only way you could do it would be to start completely new artist profiles. So I started creating lots more artist profiles: one that had live concerts of mine on it, one that had some ambient music I made, all with just symbols for names. It started to become quite a creative outlet.
I was always sticking to the concept of: I don’t want to have to explain this. I want to create something that people can explore and work out for themselves. I’m very bored of everything being explained. I feel like with every record campaign, there’s this need to communicate every little detail all the time, because we have to push out content always. Obviously, now I’m doing an interview about it, which completely goes against that.
I hadn’t really thought into the future. When I look at it now, the length of it doesn’t really shock me at all. It feels like looking back through an old calendar. I see the chunks of it, and I think, oh yeah, that’s the time when I was really into checking out every single Curtis Mayfield production, or that’s the time when I interested in every record that Future was putting out, or the time when I was listening to all the old Lilith Fair artists.
I listen mainly to records, and in the main lounge in my house, you can’t even listen to streaming at all. But it’s very often that I’ll buy some records, check them all out, then go to Spotify and look for what’s there. I get really nerdy. With old soul records and things like that, I’ll compare all the different versions on Spotify and I’ll make sure the one that goes in the playlist is the best audio quality version I can find, and that it hasn’t been improperly trimmed down to fit onto a compilation or something.
But the records also lead me to find these weird anomalies that are buried deep in Spotify. The other week I was texting with a friend of mine because I found a weird version of the Gal Costa song “Baby.” The original version has a lot of reverb. But the one on Spotify has been remastered in some way so that it doesn’t have any reverb on it, and so it has this really different sound and atmosphere. I don’t know if it’s better or worse, it’s just different.
Something like that is included because I love the Smashing Pumpkins, but it’s not remotely interesting to me to say to the world, “Everybody listen to ‘Cherub Rock’ again.” But maybe there’s a Smashing Pumpkins curveball that will actually fit the playlist. I’m not interested in sharing things that are brutally obvious, that you’re hearing everywhere else. I add mainstream things sometimes, but I try to choose things that my audience might normally shy away from. I put a Britney Spears song on there, but I’m playing it to an audience that might never go to Britney Spears.
Totally. If you listen to it with a different ear, there’s quite a lot going on.
There’s also a Metallica demo of the bass player just playing solo bass, and the song after that is an early Tortoise track that has a prominent bass in the theme. Hearing the Metallica thing in that context makes it sound like a post-rock track. And then I follow that with a track by Ry Cooder, from the Paris, Texas soundtrack, because there’s a song called “Ry Cooder” on the Tortoise album. So there’s a run of three songs that I very specifically tied together. There’s a clear idea there for me.
Like the Smashing Pumpkins, you might look at the Metallica one and go, Why is this here? But for some reason, in the depth of this 10-disc box set or whatever, is this nice piece of solo bass playing.
Yeah, completely. You could make a mixtape like that, but you would have to own all the records. It’s pretty mad. I mentioned that it’s super nerdy, but I’m a little bit cocky about the playlist as well. I’m like, Who are all these unknown random people who curate Spotify playlists? No way do they know as much as I do. I’m gonna school everyone. There’s a competitiveness that creeps in here and there, and I think that inspires me.
Putting out music for 25 years or so, you’ve had the formats change all the time, and you sort of hit the point where you’re like, if you can’t beat them, join them. This is where everybody listens to music, and I realize I need to be here or else nobody’s going to listen to my music. But I’m still going to fight the good fight for believing in music in a deep way. I’m not going to allow music to become trivial in my universe. If I’m going to engage with these platforms, I’m going to do it on my terms.
We’re at this moment where you can see quite clearly that Spotify existing at all has actually changed the music. Watching library music get generated just to fill these ambient relaxation playlists, you realize how many people use Spotify just as a functional thing. And me worrying about these various versions of songs I love—I use it in such a different way. That’s my constant frustration with them: They cater more to the people who don’t care about music than the people who do.
I’m sure that there will be. I wish I had the statistics: There are these enormous chunks of Spotify that nobody’s even listened to. I wish I had the time to really start investigating and unearthing things. I’m sure there’s all sorts of weird stuff going on. We’ve seen obscure old records reissued, and people going through old demo CDs, releasing everything they can possibly find. The era of going back through what happened during streaming is going to be wild. Who knows? We’re definitely missing out on something that, when we look back on it, is going to make sense in a completely different way. Time is powerful. It changes music quite a lot.
