Dialogue

1999’s Dialogue was Four Tet’s debut artist album. It’s a melange of instrumental hip hop/psychedelic trip hop and meandering post-rock, but rather than just re-using parts from disparate genres or making musical quotations, Kieran Hebden uses sampling to entirely remove sounds from their place in history, creating music that is chronologically unstable. So hip-hop-derived beats provide backing for acoustic pluck sounds and synthetic harps, the combination somehow simultaneously electronic and rustic, as though musical DNA from lost English folk music or arcane 1970s government information films has been spliced with contemporary electronica. It’s a beguiling and highly original debut, an early test run for a series of ideas that this genuinely innovative producer would go on to develop, refine and consolidate over the next two decades.