Buchla

The Buchla synthesizer — Don Buchla's West Coast alternative to the Moog's more conventional architecture — produces sounds that seem to come from nowhere familiar, its capacitive touch plates and function generators capable of timbres that have no acoustic reference point, no physical object that might produce them in the natural world. Four Tet's engagement with this particular instrument is direct and unmediated, the track building from material that announces its electronic origin without apology, the sounds clearly and deliberately synthetic. Yet the music isn't cold or distant — Kieran Hebden's particular gift is for finding warmth within the electronic, for processing and contextualizing synthetic material in ways that create emotional resonance despite the absence of any organic reference. The Buchla's characteristic sounds — complex, harmonically rich, often unpredictable in their evolution — are organized into a structure that maintains Four Tet's usual concern with the relationship between pattern and variation, predictability and surprise. Rhythmically the track is less conventionally groove-oriented than some of Hebden's work, the percussion elements integrated into textural fabric rather than foregrounded as structural anchors. The emotional experience is curious and alert, oriented toward discovery rather than comfort — music that offers the pleasure of encountering something that doesn't quite fit existing categories, that expands rather than confirms the listener's sense of what electronic sound can feel like.