Eleven tracks of mostly dance floor-focused material interspersed with shorter experimental pieces from Four Tet, here he uses dubstep, grime, UK Garage and techno templates as vehicles to pursue his own musical agenda, with Beautiful Rewind acting as a neat summing up of the cutting-edge of early 2010s UK club culture. 

It’s experimental and progressive, engaged in redrawing genre boundaries by reckless juxtapositions and the development — just that bit further than other producers — of tiny stylistic tropes and tweaks. The future-folk-flecked acoustronica of Four Tet’s earlier albums is largely absent here, replaced with hard-edged club beats, speaker-rattling basslines and an aesthetic that is often urgent and anxious rather than dreamy and introspective. The music may contain traces of several previous genres but is wrought in new colours and fresh shapes.

– Harold Heath

In early 2013, Kieran Hebden and his family rented a house in upstate New York. Hebden was listening to tapes of jungle and grime pirate radio, which reminded him of his home in London, and also thinking about New Age, a kind of music made in and around upstate New York during the Seventies. The music was shuttling Hebden between two places, and this journey was how Beautiful Rewind started.

Hebden began working with digital archives of pirate radio and came up with the idea of, as he wrote to me, “a New Age album where the instruments were ‘pirate radio, bells and synthesiser.’” With this idea in place, the album was completed in short order. Hebden loaded hours of pirate radio into a sampler and then used the files like he would a synth plugin. The static and voices and records captured in the pirate radio recordings were treated less as historical fragments and more as pure sound.

Other artists have done very different things with similar material. Burial’s entire catalog is a rave seen through glass and Jamie XX’s In Color represents a translation of pirate radio energy. Beautiful Rewind is very much itself, an instrumental album that doesn’t represent “chill” or “dance” or any single, specific mode. “Our Navigation” sounds a lot like a garage track pressed like a leaf between the pages of a book. “Kool FM” and “Buchla” let the pirate radio samples drift in a blue wash of sustained tones and ringing pitches. Hebden doesn’t cram Four Tet tracks with unnecessary detail and he’s not fond of abrupt changes. He’s what the junglists would call a roller and Beautiful Rewind rolls all the way into its own garage.

– Sasha Frere-Jones