Four Tet & William Tyler - 41 Longfield Street Late 80’s Review
A quietly luminous meeting of minds, where Four Tet’s textural instinct and William Tyler’s pastoral guitar refract 80s Americana into something both tender and untethered.
When Keiran Hebden first began making a name for himself as Four Tet in the early 00s, he was often slapped with the ‘Folktronica’ genre tag. An attempt by music journalists (how dare they) to succinctly sum up the way he used digital production techniques to blend richly organic sounds into something soothingly pastoral, but wonkily leftfield. In reality, his approach had no connection to folk music and would find himself sharing festival billings with artists from completely unrelated musical spheres. Much of Four Tet’s following experiments with free jazz, and later minimal house, could be seen as an ongoing attempt to shake off that unhelpful and inaccurate characterisation of his music as “Folktronica”.
But over 20 years later, maybe it’s finally time to reconsider the label, as his latest collaboration with William Tyler, longtime member of alt-folk collective Lambchop, could ironically fit the description Folktronica, in its marrying of Tyler’s guitar playing with Hebden’s electronic production wizardry. 41 Longfield Street Late 80s is an unhurried twisting of the radio dial through 80s Americana, embedding Tyler’s measured guitar playing into soundscapes as drawn out and expansive as the great plains of the Midwest. Not electronic as such, but definitely in keeping with Hebden’s open-minded approach to source material.
The record opens with an 11 minute mood piece which gently announces itself on smouldering guitar distortion, before the sound of strummed strings gradually materialises like a reflection on rippling water. After two and half minutes, things snap into focus with a plucked acoustic guitar refrain - which in fact turns out to be a relatively faithful cover of If I Had a Boat, by the American country singer, Lyle Lovett. Despite lacking lyrics, the track retains all the wholesomeness and bittersweet nostalgia of the original. Country music displaced from its country.
Tyler and Hebden’s partnership began as all the best ones do at a festival, where the pair bonded over a mutual love of late 90s experimental music, from Godspeed You Black Emperor to Fennesz. The latter’s influence can be heard here in the deployment of guitar as texture, and empty space as architecture. Again like many fruitful collaborations of recent years, they traded material remotely during the pandemic, which in 2023 resulted in the opulently psychedelic 12” Darkness, Darkness. A meandering, lumbering ten minute acid trip that filtered West Coast psychedelia through Four Tet’s musical kaleidoscope.
But anyone expecting more in that vein will be surprised by 41 Longfield Street, which takes as its inspiration American country and folk music from the 1980s - hence the Lyle Lovett cover - an unlikely but deep rooted influence the two musicians discovered they have in common, largely thanks to their fathers.
The result is a sparse but gentle record, which doesn’t exactly broadcast its influences, so much as reimagine and recontextualise them. Speaking of broadcasting, two tracks reference the concept of radio, I Want an Antennae and Loretta Guides my Hand Through the Radio, each one a passing interlude that gives the sense of a musical continuum, a reminder that music floats free on the airwaves and its context will always depend on where it ends up being broadcast.
All that really remains of country music here are guitars, sometimes clearly recognisable as plucked strings or vibrating chords, but more often just the shape of the instrument, the murmur of feeling as it glides through the mix. That and the emotional residue, so to speak; an ache of longing, nostalgia for big open skies and the summer breeze on your cheek, the pang of first love’s heartbreak.
Given Hebden’s description of the recording process, with the pair each laying down extended improvs on guitar in the studio, which he would then take back to his computer “and bring it to my other world”, you get the sense the record was composed via a process of subtraction. “On some tracks, all that’s left of the guitars are digital fragments of sound making rhythmic textures.” As someone coming into this far more familiar with Four Tet than William Tyler, these tend to be my preferred sections. And I occasionally found myself wanting a bit more meat on the bone, to the point where 41 Longfield is sometimes too sparse for its own good, especially the mid-section consisting of When it Rains and Timber. Each a meditative study of layers of guitar, minimal but lush, yet in each case I yearn for a little more direction - for Four Tet to take Tyler’s picks and plucks somewhere more exciting.
Four Tet is such an accomplished producer, and possesses an apparently bottomless knowledge of musical history and genre interconnectedness that he could bring almost any collaborator into his world and create something recognisably Four Tet. So although 41 Longfield doesn’t sound much like many of his recent albums, it still bears that trademark touch that fans of his more mellow work will find plenty to enjoy. Just don’t call it Folktronica.