Four Tet - Rounds

Listening to Four Tet reminds me of two things. One, the audio galaxy days, and two the tedious tape loop projects we had to do back at uni. Four Tet was one of the first "artists" to provide 'legal' content on audio galaxy that didn't actually suck massive amounts. Most of the other legal stuff was uploaded by garage bands and/or mental patients and was excrutiatingly painful to listen to. When AG went the way of Napster and removed all their copyrighted material the only decent thing that remained was four tet. It's all instrumental electronica using a technique called tape looping. for those unfamiliar this involves stringing sections of pre-recorded audio tape together and playing them repetitively and/or in reverse at different speeds and pitches to create a beat or musical pattern. One of our first tasks in music 101 at uni was to create a song using this technique. And boy wasn't that fun. cutting tiny strips of magnetic tape and sticking them together in order to create 90 seconds of some of the worst "music" you've ever heard. I'm pretty sure mine ended up sounding like a cross between a kitten being hacked to death by a blind samurai and a giant redwood being fed into a victor lawn mower while the vienna boys choir sung the halleluiah chorus with a mouth full of yoghurt and marbles. Of course nowadays computers allow us to create similar sounds electronically so students of the future may not get the pleasure of learning this technique. Brian Eno would be spinning in his grave...wait..what do you mean he's not dead.
listen to this off second album Pause And for a modern example of tape looping look no further than radioheads like spinning plates