Session Transcript:
Kieran Hebden
Red Bull Music Academy, Sao Paulo 2002

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

When Kieran Hebden's band Fridge first formed, they would record their glitch rock gems in a basement. They plugged the TV into the mixing desk, mic'd up their computer games and mixed the lot through a hi-fi. The resulting sonics wowed everyone from Trevor Jackson - who released the early Fridge and the Four Tet solo projects - and Arthur Baker, who brought Hebden into the studio to record with Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr's Electronic project. Oh, and Hebden once made the longest record ever to be played on radio, the self-explanatory Thirtyssixtwentyfive...

Kieran Hebden: »When we formed our band, Fridge, we just played in our bedrooms for something like six months to a year. We'd play one chord for an hour and just jam and see what happened, but we were enjoying ourselves. Eventually, we sent out a tape and got our first gig and we were terrible! We were really, really bad.

Pretty much every day I hung out in record shops. One time this guy starts talking to me. He's this music enthusiast and he's notices the record I'm buying, and tells me that he's in a band called Emperors New Clothes, and that their producer Trevor Jackson, who produces under the name of The Underdog, is starting a label called Output and wants to hear demos. So I send Trevor our demo and he phones me three days later, wanting to put our record out. He's done mixes for big names like U2 , The Gravediggaz and Everything But The Girl. I had been really into the stuff he was doing so I couldn't believe I was gonna meet him.

So we meet up with Trevor and he tells us that he loves our demo and asks us what we need to make an album. We just looked at each other, then asked for an eight-track cassette recorder, a bass amp and a reverb unit. Those were the only things we could think of. A couple of weeks later the equipment arrives and we set it up in my basement and recorded solidly for a week. We played it to Trevor and he said: "OK, we'll use all these tracks and make an album." So our single, Lojen, comes out and we just can't believe it.

We were doing all kinds of things back then. We'd take a television and plug it into the mixing desk. We'd record a track and then afterwards we'd mic up our computer games and just record that on top, anything I could think of. We used everything we could find in the room.

Our album, Ceefax came out on Output. It was basically rock tracks and dance-influenced tracks. We were influenced by bands like Can and Stereolab. I was just 17, finishing school, and we're getting phone calls for magazine interviews. Everyone seems to be getting interested in us and we're just really enjoying ourselves.

Six months pass and it's time to make another album. So we go to Trevor and the process starts over again. He asks us what we need and then we're back to recording three or four songs a day. By now we're getting a bit more ambitious and we've got this little white keyboard that can sample about one second. This was around the time that drum 'n' bass was really kicking off in London, so we tried to incorporate this into our music. We didn't really know how to get that sound. We tried recording drummachines really slow onto tape and then speeding them up. We're mastering all this stuff really quickly and giving it to Trevor whose like: "That's brilliant guys. I'm gonna put it out."

We mixed everything really raw. We didn't have any monitors or anything, just wired into a hi-fi. I listen to some of those tracks nowadays and hear loads of mistakes in there, bass too boomy etc. We just seemed to have this notion that we had to record as much as possible and as fast as possible because we couldn't believe we had the luxury of having all this recording equipment.

So our next album, Semaphore, has been out for a while when Trevor calls up to tell us that the first track off the album is gonna be used on a TV series about modern art for Channel 4. They made our track the theme music and it's on all the trailers for the programme. So we're hearing our music everywhere!

Trevor's also learning about how to run a label at the same time that we're learning how to be a band. He starts to find out more about radio promotion, sending out our records which end up getting played a lot on XFM, this new independent radio station in London.

By this time, I'm at university and I'm starting to realise that I'm not making any money from any of these records. There's plenty coming out. The first single sold 300 copies and the first album sold 1.000. We had an agreement with Trevor that we'd split the profits equally, but little did I realise that when you're putting out a record out on this small a scale, there isn't going to be any profits. In fact, they may even make a loss. But none of us were complaining at the time because we were all living off grants and student loans.

One day we get a call from Trevor to tell us that Arthur Baker is really into our music. I'm like: "That's cool. Who's Arthur Baker?" It turns out that Arthur Baker produced Planet Rock [by Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force] and works with huge names like Bruce Springsteen. He'd heard us on XFM and wanted to hire us to work on his new project: a band called Electronic, with Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr. So we catch the train down to London and arrive at a place called Rak Studios, which is stuffed full of vintage analogue gear and costs a fortune to rent out. It's the first time I've ever been in a recording studio and I've got two engineers and a runner who will get anything I want.

Arthur basically wanted us to be like session musicians and contribute ideas, etc. So we start to set up the equipment we brought down with us, our drums and these little Casio keyboards held together with sellotape and Bernard Sumner from New Order is laughing at us. He can't believe what he's seeing.

So we just started recording stuff, using all the old gear they had around, like these space echoes and generally having fun. We tell Arthur that we need to do some edits and he calls in this ProTools guy [Merv De Peyer] with this big computer. I've never seen of any of this stuff before. So we record and edit like this for two days and everything we make in this really expensive studio sounds exactly like what we make in our bedroom!

That was a weird time. All the magic I thought you'd get in a big expensive studio just disappeared from that point on. I'm just as happy at home with the little eight-track tape recorder Trevor hires for us.

By now I'm 20, with three albums out and a double CD of all the singles and EPs we've done. I think the singles were more interesting than the albums at this point. One of them was called Orko. The local primary school let us borrow all the instruments they had in their music room - all these wooden mallet type instruments. We brought them all into our little bedroom studio and recorded this weird, dark record. Most people don't think it's our best work but I'm really proud of it still.

I'm also hanging out more with Trevor Jackson, who's really connected and we'll be at these parties where he introduces me to people like Gilles Peterson and James Lavelle. These guys tell me that they're into my record, which they've listened to because Trevor gave it to them personally.

Trevor's also introducing me to loads of new hip hop and dance records that are coming out. I'm getting more and more into this kind of music and now all I want to do is sample. I took out a loan and I bought myself a computer and downloaded a program called Cool Edit and got hold of a pirated copy of Cakewalk.

I'm listening to more soul and funk - things that are linked more with hip hop through sampling. I'd want to know the original records they sampled and start hunting them out. Through that, I started to check out jazz. My father used to play me jazz and although I wasn't into it, I did think that there must some different kind of jazz that I'd probably be really into. I'm reading up about this stuff and learn about this Miles Davis album called Bitches Brew - how it's some real classic heavy stuff. So we go out and buy it, bring it home and sure enough it's insane! It's unlike anything I've heard. The tracks are 20 minutes long, there are bells on it and everything - stuff's going backwards and we were like: "Wow. This is kind of cool."

After hearing that, I dive right into jazz music. I discover people like John Coltrane, which leads me to Alice Coltrane. I check out her records and it's the kind of music I've been after for ages. It encompasses everything I'm really interested in. That was a really intense time.

So all this is going on and I've also started to listen to Gilles Peterson's show. He's playing all this jazz-influenced dance music like 4 Hero, what people were calling nu jazz. So I buy their record and I hate it! It's like the weakest record I've ever heard, all jazz fusion, really clean sounding.

When DJ Shadow's stuff started coming out, it suddenly became apparent to me that you could make music solely from samples. I wanted to do that sort of thing and incorporate all the 'voodoo murkiness' of the jazz I was listening to. This was the start of my solo project, which I call Four Tet. It was almost like a reaction to these supposedly nu jazz dance records that were coming out.

I'm just doing this every day on my little computer, now that I can edit beats together. Before I know it, I've got about 10 tracks. I send some of it to Trevor and he says: "You don't need to start dabbling in all those beats and stuff. You should concentrate more on the band." So I send it to this guy called Tony Morley instead, who was doing our press. He also runs a label called Leaf. He was like: "Wow, I'm totally into that. I want to put out your record." So that's cool and I tell him that the first single is to be this track called Thirtysixtwentyfive, which is basically the length - 36 minutes, 25 seconds long. It's got seven different drum passages in it with all this stuff going on. The track ends with about eight minutes of noises taken from answer machines.

So I give Thirtysixtwentyfive: to Tony and he is like: "I can't put out a 36 minute single. No-one's gonna play it anywhere, it's too long." I'm totally dispirited by this. So then I send a copy of this track to Trevor and say: "How about this then?" Trevor phones me back a week later to say that the track blew his mind, that he wants to put it out more than anything else we've done before.

The next thing I know, this track is getting played on the radio in its entirety. XFM played all 36 minutes of it, the DJ said it was the longest track ever played on the radio. Then half an hour later, the next DJ came on and played it again. I've had one hour of my music played on the radio in one night!

While this is going on, an A&R guy from Go! Beat called Steve Bass calls up. Go! Beat's two big acts are Portishead and Gabrielle. So this guy Steve Bass is like: "I'm really into your music. Let's meet when I'm next in London." The next day Warp Records call, basically saying the same thing and I'm thinking this is kind of weird, seeing as I've never talked to any labels before.

I meet Steve from Go! Beat and he offers to sign us for a three record deal with proper promotion, etc. He also offers to pay some money up-front, about £7.000. So I said: "OK, let me talk to the band first." I call up some of the people that Tony at Leaf Records does press for and they all say that big labels like Go! Beat shouldn't pay less than £50.000 for a band. I thought the idea of being paid that much was crazy. How am I possibly gonna have the audacity to go up to this guy and say: "Look, if you are remotely serious, you're going to have to offer us some proper money."

Well, we managed to ask for more money, but we felt that we had to give them some sort of justification for that amount. So we tell Go! Beat that we're going to quit our studies and build a studio and really put our hearts into it.

Go! Beat agrees to our proposal and end up giving us £50.000. Everything's changing very rapidly and then a few weeks later, Universal Publishing calls, suggesting a meeting to talk about our publishing rights. I call up Trevor and ask him what publishing is, I didn't have a clue. He says it's the rights to our music and that they should give us the same money we'll get for our record deal. So I'm like: "Oh my god!" Realising that our plans to build a studio and live off the money from the record deal are a bit too ambitious, we agree to a publishing deal and Universal pay us £x.

All of us then joined the musicians union, who give you a free lawyer to go over the 70-page contracts from Go! Beat and Universal that we had no hope of understanding. It took the lawyer three months to get through it, but sure enough, we signed the deals. Trevor was cool with us leaving Output, and I've remained good friends with him.

We all quit our courses and moved into a house that Go! Beat rented for us in Farringdon, London. We bought two ADAT machines and a big Mackie 24-track mixing desk. Not to mention DAT machines, a valve compressor and an equalizer. We set all of that up in one room with two drum kits and our collection of old synths, plus all kinds of rubbish. We've got millions of guitar and percussion instruments.

We were getting more into electronic music - people like Aphex Twin and Boards Of Canada. Along with all that, there was this speed garage scene going on. MJ Cole's Sincere came out and all of us agreed that this was our favourite record of the year. We would sit in the studio and listen to Alice Coltrane for an hour and then we'd listen to Sincere for an hour. Then we'd record something and sure enough, the first record that came out of that house was a straight up mesh of Alice Coltrane and MJ Cole!

So in all the press we did for Kinoshita Terasaka, our first 12" for Go! Beat, I'm saying to everyone that MJ Cole was a great influence for this record. We embark on a little tour to promote the music and decide to have DJs open for us. We tell Go! Beat that we'd like MJ Cole, who then calls us and says: "You guys have given me so much amazing press I can't believe it. I'm really into your record I'll be happy to open for you guys."«