Four Tet live preview
Last November, Four Tet sold out Brixton Academy in ten minutes. In isolation, that’s no biggie – plenty of acts on this year’s Primavera bill have done that before breakfast. But it seems more remarkable for an act who still sits definitely on the underground side of current dance music, whose last album was a self-released collection of limited-edition vinyl-only singles, and for an event that Four Tet himself brazenly promised would have “no lighting and it’s not going to be about the performance on stage”.
But therein lays his appeal, especially at a festival: forget the daft multimedia pantomimes and the dodgy messianic gestures from the stage. Forget even the over-egged build-it-up/tear-it-down dynamics of the standard dance music festival slot. With Four Tet’s pulsating, beautiful and transporting live show, there’s no bullshit, no pizzazz, no self-aggrandisement or attention seeking, just a softly-spoken bloke in front of a table of throbbing machinery concentrating intently on making his music buzz and bleep with an organic inclusiveness that few of his peers even contemplate. In the extraordinary surroundings of the Parc Del Forum, all brutalist concrete and moonlit sea, gimmicks are redundant – and Four Tet will show you exactly why.
