Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden just released his latest Domino album, “Everything Ecstatic,” but the electronica artist is already busy with several other projects. Among them are a new album with his band Fridge, a collaborative project with veteran drummer Steve Reid and a DVD of videos for tracks from “Everything Ecstatic.”
The album with Reid came about after he and Hebden played one-off shows together in Paris and London. “He’s a jazz drummer and he use to play with James Brown for a while and he played with Motown,” Hebden tells Billboard.com. “It’s just improvised music — just drums and electronics.”
The set will likely be dubbed “The Exchange Sessions,” after the London studio where it was recorded. “We literally have just finished it so we are going to start organizing a release next week,” Hebden says.
As for Fridge, with which Hebden began his rock career as a teenager, the group began assembling ideas last Christmas for its first album since 2001’s “Happiness,” with an eye on having it ready by next year.
“The last few sessions we did were literally throwing all sorts of ideas around,” he says. “Some of it was coming out quite aggressive [with] really quite heavy pounding drums. There’s lots of really sparse, sort of folk bits as well. o we are all over the place. I have no idea what the album is going to sound like.”
Hebden is cautiously optimistic Fridge could mount a tour in support of the album. “I’d like to think so,” he says. “It’s just the eventual timing in our lives. I don’t know how available everyone is going to be, but it’d be nice to.”
Beginning Sept. 15 in Orlando, Fla., Hebden will hit the road in support of “Everything Ecstatic” on what will be his longest headlining tour in North America to date. The album’s companion DVD will be released in November and will feature “a different director on each different track,” according to the artist.
One of the things I wanted to do was give opportunities to people who have never made a video before and see what I came up with,” Hebden offers. “I have a friend who does these animations by painting directly on the film and then putting them through a projector. I think it’s 45 drawings for one second of footage. It’s really, really nice — she’s done an incredible video.”
Source billboard.com.
