Four Tet

The mere mention of the word folktronica is enough to elicit a slight wince from Four Tet's Kieran Hebden. The man who kick-started a whole new genre based on merging rustic sounds with glitchy electronica is rebelling. Joking that he has no interest whatsoever in farming, Hebden has left behind all things pastoral on his new album Everything Ecstatic.

"Making the new record I definitely had this rebellious attitude that I had to get out of this rut," he says, "not because I'm not interested in folk music. I've been dabbling in bits of it and people are just homing in on that. I am influenced by folk music but just as much by hip hop, soul, jazz, punk and all these other things."

He rallies against being pigeon-holed in any way and promptly announces that "I've done the whole folktronica thing". This is never more obvious than on first listening to Everything Ecstatic, his fourth release following the phenomenally successful Rounds (2003) which was preceded by Pause (2001) and Dialogue (1999). Getting rid of the pleasant acoustic instrumentation normally associated with folktronica, Hebden plumps for a tumbling riot of Krautrock drumming, free jazz and hip hop. The effect is dazzling.

"I made the record really quickly in two months and I wanted it to have this burst of energy to it. I think it came out sounding quite diverse." The inspiration behind it, he says, was "people saying dance music was dead". Never one to follow trends his gut reaction was to pull all the dance records off his shelf and listen to them. "I found a lot of old Detroit techno like Derrick May and people like that sounded really fresh and relevant so I think that was definitely spilling into what I was doing." He also cites Java's gamelan music as another major influence.

Everything Ecstatic has perhaps unsurprisingly given its title been called Hebden's "happiest-sounding" album. And while he admits that the past few years have been "incredible", the album is more about the feeling of joy that you get from listening to music than the soundtrack to a personal state of achievement. "It's more about a sense of euphoria," he says, "sometimes when you listen to music it's almost like you're losing your mind and you're leaving the planet."

Being considered a pioneer in your field would be enough to put a smile on anyone's face though and Hebden has often been described as a musical innovator. He takes this tag lightly and says he tries to keep it all in perspective. "To me you can only really make sense of it in the future once some time has passed because every week some magazine is saying this band is the greatest new band in the world and six months later everyone's completely forgotten about them. I can only dream and hope that maybe the music I'm making is going to have some level of significance in 50 or 100 years time. All I can really do now is try my best."

For more information, please visit the official Four Tet site.