About

There were no advance copies of Four Tet’s 10th studio album, Sixteen Oceans, sent to press. Any review you read of the album today was pondered over a weekend’s worth of listens right alongside the general public, hopefully while in self-imposed isolation meant to curb calamitous viral outbreak. This is partially because Kieran Hebden doesn’t need press. For over two decades now, fans have found their own path to his prodigious output organically, beginning with his late-’90s post-rock project Fridge, through his early experiments in sound collage and nu-jazz to his current success as a house DJ and producer.

Whether you’ve followed Four Tet from its humbled beginnings or came across Hebden via his collaborations with some of the biggest names in music, Sixteen Oceans — released on his own Text Records imprint — functions beautifully as something of an abstract biography, filtered through the lens of Hebden’s evolution toward more traditional expressions within house music. It’s hard to connect wordless songs directly to an electronic artist’s life story, but the way Hebden chose to title and arrange the tracks here suggests a gentle chronology, imbued with nostalgia and reflection on where his creative process has taken him over the last 20 years. – Stereogum