It starts off with something that sounds like it came straight out of the Doctor’s Tardis – a combination of wave signal and noise generators, filters and square- and sine-wave oscillators backed up by pulses and beats falling cheerfully through time, relativity, dimensions and space. Fourtet is back. Back from his bonkers jazz experiments with Steve Reid, back with a big fat grin on his face and back indeed with the goods.
The Ringer mini album is a 32 minute, four-track excursion into the kind of wide-open spaces you might find if you set out to make techno with an afrobeat/krautrock sensibility. And once ‘Ringer’ is out of the way, it’s a fairly straight and attractive affair: ‘Ribbons’ with its needles and pins arpeggios and its warm, rippling beats, ‘Swimmer’ with its distressed and scratchy guitars, its harmonics and interminable organ chord and ‘Wing Body Wing’ with its completely ludicrous name and its even more ludicrous finger-snapping, tap percussion. Granted, if Jean Michel Jarre had come up with it, we’d have have probably said it was crap – but somehow it works in this deliciously warped and protracted context.
I don’t hear any ‘hits’ here, but then I don’t hear any misses. No boos. Just hisses.