Band Research: Four Tet Music Videos

Four Tet is the stage name for Kieran Hebden, who is a solo experimental, electronic DJ and musician that Lawrence King named as one of his influences. Similarly, The music from Four Tet is also predominately lyricless. Four Tet uses samples from r'n'b and hip hop to Jazz and other electronica mixed with Hebden's guitar tracks. VH1 describes him as "balancing organic and programmed sounds" in his music.


The video for Hands is filmed in soft focus to give the images a distorted feel. The images all fit into the nature theme, with animals, leaves and a jellyfish. The video is understated and concept based, meant as an accompaniment for the music, not a video in its own right. Its evident that the artist wants his music to be the talking point, not the music video.


She Moves She is one of Four Tet's adventures into a more professional artistic music video, directed by Ed Holdsworth. The music video is concept based, beginning with a train leaving a station, with the video shown as a point of view shot for the trains window. The images start unaffected at first, but become introverted, illustrated and mirrored. The colours are often enhanced or turned negative. The footage is show in fast motion, in beat to the music. At the end the images duplicate to the beat of the music until they become nonexistent.

The above video is for the Four Tet track Smile Around Your Face and features actor Mark Heap. The video is one very simple concept- a continuous close up of Mark's face. However, The close up tracks to follow Mark as he goes about his day, almost as if the camera is strapped on the front of his body. Nothing out of the ordinary happens on Mark's day; he leaves his house, gets the bus, take a tumble on the bus and gets a headache, takes his kids to the park and has a bath. However if you look a little deeper into the narrative the video becomes highly emotional. Mark is picking his kids up from another house (presumably an ex wife) and takes them to play at the park but has to take them back again. When alone later in the bath the cinematography suggests he is sad that he cannot be with his children and the time he has with them is precious. This is done by blending the shot of him in the park with his children and the one with him in the bath- making it almost feel like a daydream. After the sequence when Mark falls over of the bus the video is edited in such a way that we are aware that Mark has a headache. The colours are distorted and saturated, and are uneasy to look at.