Tweak-a-boo Kieran Hebden moves Four Tet past folktronica BY TONY WARE

Speaking over the phone from his girlfriend’s parents’ house in the Glenview suburb of Chicago, Kieran Hebden — better known as Four Tet — is going a bit mad. "I’m in the middle-class suburbs, and it’s very different. It’s not so bad, I just miss London. Then there are the times I want to get away from London and work in Wales in the mountains. And for a week it’s the most amazing place. Then after two weeks I want to get as far away from there as possible. Basically what I’m saying is I can stay at extremes for only so long."

Indeed, it’s Hedben’s unwillingness to reside at any one extreme that defines his fourth Four Tet album, Everything Ecstatic (Domino). The album eschews the "folktronica" style he’s been saddled with in favor of something as hard to pin down as Hebden himself.

The British-born producer, who headlines downstairs at the Middle East this Wednesday, was brought up in a "middle-class, left-wing family" with a father he describes as "an obsessive music fan." So bombardment by music began at an early age — everything from Chuck Berry to Don Cherry, Sun Ra to Townes Van Zant. Equally important to the young Hebden’s development was the city he calls home. "Living in London pointed me in the direction of my music, because it’s such a mixture of people, culture, and art. You hear drum ’n’ bass, then the Pogues, then trance — different music every few meters. It’s Turkish pop to dancehall, and you go see music that way as well. People in London aren’t purists. They’re very social. I don’t think I’d make the music I make not having grown up like that."

The music Hebden makes on Everything Ecstatic builds off 2003’s Rounds, a comforting elecro-acoustic mix of woozy resonances and vitreous melodies all looped together in swelling pools of plaintive soundscapes. The new material is buoyed by scampering glitches that underpin a micro-weave of subtle tonal gesticulations. But the more blurt-oriented, strata-straddling Ecstatic shies from the pastoral and placid. "People heard my recordings and identified the idea of mixing electronic and live sounds together, lumped me with a handful of musicians to create a makeshift scene, and said we all made ‘folktronica,’ like it was an innovation. I think that’s ridiculous, because hip-hop has been mixing sounds for 20 years."

Everything Ecstatic was produced with what Hebden characterizes as an "element of rebellion" that he relates to hip-hop. In other words, it’s all about the beats. And that has everything to do with the kick he’s gotten out of performing live as Four Tet, improvising behind two Sony VAIO laptops running Audiomulch and Cool Edit, a Boss Dr. Sample, and a Pioneer DJM-600 mixer. "With the latest album, the way the drums build and build and build was something I was getting more into in the live show. So that total noise mayhem, those crescendos, ended up on the album."

One imagines Hebden grinning as he generates the churning percussion and slurred melodies of Everything Ecstatic, opening the door for all kinds of interpretations and reinterpretations. "Everything I do is personal, but I also want it to be absurd," he explains as we revisit that notion of extremes. "I like when a guitar comes in to evoke someone sitting and playing the instrument, but then the riff turns backwards and slows down and humanly impossible things begin to happen. I like playing with people’s concepts of how sound works. And I love to collect other people’s conceptions in order to re-form them. My albums have been like those guitar riffs that can be played backwards or forwards. Why evoke the same mood all the time?"

Four Tet + Hot Chip + Koushik | downstairs at the Middle East, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | Sept 21 | 617.864.EAST