- "Question," the latest Four Tet bomb to make it onto wax, was everywhere this summer. Played by all the DJs—Caribou, Floating Points, Jamie xx—you'd expect to go wild for a jacking edit of a funk track, it's been made available in an ultra-limited release of 100 white-label copies split between the London record stores Phonica and Sounds Of The Universe. The single-sided vinyl captures Kieran Hebden, a producer whose catalogue covers a vast emotional range, at his happiest.
The record is produced as KH, an alias Hebden has only used for one edit before, 2013's The Track I've Been Playing That People Keep Asking About And That Joy Used In His RA Mix And Daphni Played On Boiler Room. "Question"'s title is similarly literal, but it makes its point quicker, looping a sung vocal—"Somebody tell me the answer to the question"—over a stomping kick drum and a breezy guitar lick for seven minutes. The vocal and melody are eventually filtered and, at one point, stripped away for a short, melody-free passage, until we get to the abrupt outro. There's not much else to it, but that's its charm. Life's good when you're Kieran Hebden, an artist who can send the scene into meltdown with an Instagram clip. He's been around since the '90s, so I suspect he finds this side of things a bit mad. Is "Question" a comment on track ID culture, or a summer banger with no strings attached? Does Hebden know something we don't? Does somebody know the answer to the question?