the tet offensive
February 23rd, 2010So last night tuesday I went to see Four Tet at Le Poisson Rouge and it was a pretty interesting show. For one thing, it started at 11pm and I'm slowly realizing that I'm not sure I want to do late night shows if I have to go into work in the morning. The crowd was geek-chic, which was cool. The opening guy was really good, I did an iphone film to kind of give you an idea…it's pretty loud on the vid, but you have to imagine it so loud it hurts your ears:
Then Four Tet was good. His stuff was more subtle, more in sync, better produced. Sometimes this had the unfortunate effect of kind of sounding exactly like he sounds on CD, which tends to bore me at live events. But people were dancing, it got hot, the sound system was killer. After a while, I'd had enough. I thought to myself "I've seen enough of this show now to know that no matter how amazing he gets, it's not going to blow me away." I started to head out, got to the stairs, and then he dropped this track:
[audio: As_Serious_as_Your_Life.mp3]
It stopped me. The bass sample was do deep and great. The sound system there is amazing, and this track came to life in a big way. Amazing.
It also reminded me of this conversation I had with Wall Matthews last June. Wall is one of the owners and the main music writer for Clean Cuts, this audio house we work with a bunch. Great people, and Wall is a totally nice guy, talented. (Plus his kids are these hip hop beat makers who've done beats for 2Pac, Bone Thugs, etc. Legit.)
Anyway, in the 70's, Wall was in this band called The Ensemble or something, with a bunch of other folks. One of the women he was in the band with is now a teacher, and for one of her classes, she did this music appreciation thing where she had her students come in and play a song they liked for the class. Then they'd discuss, etc.
So this one kid comes in and plays a Four Tet track, and she recognizes the guitar part as being sampled from this song that The Ensemble did! She's blown away! Can you imagine? It's so random. You hear this modern electronic track and it has a part from your old band from the 70's. Amazing.
(When Wall told me this story I was well on my way to being drunk (Promax) and I'm pretty sure I over-reacted to it in a completely over-the-top manner. But it is pretty wild.)
She tells Wall, they hunt down the album, and it's confirmed. Then the story takes a old school vs. new school flavor. They get a lawyer and contact Four Tet and basically make him pay some royalties to them for sampling the track. Boooo. When telling me the story Wall was old school adamant "C'mon Josh, he lifted like the entire part! He didn't play anything!" I did my best to make the argument that part of the talent of the sampler (the person who samples) is the ability to dig into a crate of old obscure records and find some great bit and then re-contextualize it. This didn't go down as well as I hoped, but we kind of left it with a "agree to disagree" kind of thing.
This is the track that has the sample, it's a pretty good one:
[audio: She_Moves_She.mp3]
And then I did a search for Wall and The Ensemble and came up with this gem. The part Four Tet sampled starts around 1:30ish I think. this clip has such a solid freak-out vibe…it's classic. If you know Wall, this is going to blow your mind…if you don't, well, I'm not sure what you'll think…
Anyway, it was a pretty good show, amazing sound, and too late. By the time I got out of there I was so beat…next time I'm gonna look at the show time before buying the tix…
dude, is that first guy with the long hair and stache Wall???!!!!
Yes, that is Wall. Rocking a harder mustache than you or I will ever be able to rock. And laying down some mad licks on the guitar…