Zeros and wonders

With guitar bands struggling to emerge from the shadow of rock's glorious past, you might think the days of innovation were over. Not so. Nick Hasted reports on how the music of Four Tet, Children and their ilk promises a new, digital dawn

Sometimes, it seems pop music wants to die. The notion that the sound that electrified the 20th century is set in stone in the 21st has become pervasive, that the game started for such high stakes by untouchable gods from James Brown to The Beatles is all played out. In rock music, the likes of Oasis and The Strokes have capered entertainingly in the ruins of innovative sounds from the 1960s and 1970s, but shown no capacity or interest in building their own monuments. Listen to dance music's slavishly fashion-hugging micro-movements, or the popularity-despising dry experiments conducted at its fringes, and hope for change seems lost there, too. You would be forgiven for thinking we are in the end days of sound, that the sheer unprecedented weight of music available from the past 100 years has suddenly crushed our previously endless ability for original thought.

It's a gloomy prognosis that can actually be comforting, if, like me, you're over 30 and are starting to feel your mental joints stiffen. But pop, it turns out, is far from ready for its carpet slippers. In fact, in the next fortnight alone there is a small avalanche of recorded evidence that music is as fresh as ever, and mutating at its old startling speed. Four Tet's tremendous album Rounds leads a charge that includes Matt Elliott's album The Mess We Made, Children's aptly titled debut single, "Tune to Unknown", Manitoba's recent Up in Flames, and many of the acts on Memphis Industries' recent label sampler, Estuary English.

What these records share, in part or wholly, is an interest in the boundless improvisations of 1960s free jazz, the grounding in sampling techniques of people young enough to be raised on hip hop, and a belief in the mass communicative power of pop. They are erasing the barriers between rock and dance, to reclaim a middle ground where dreamily beautiful, moving melodies and skittering, disjunctive rhythms and textures can co-exist. They are proving there are new sounds under the sun, and that pop's golden age may be ahead.

They are a disparate crew, not like the linked pop undergrounds of previous generations. Four Tet, aka Kieran Hebden, 25, started playing Hendrix covers with his band Fridge in his teens, before graduating to an interest in computers and Alice Coltrane, and combining British folk and Krautrock on his second album as Four Tet, Pause (2001). Hebden discovered the Canadian Dan Snaith, aka Manitoba, 24, who for Up in Flames, his second LP, has introduced live instruments to his previous laptop palette. Matt Elliott, 30, also known as The Third Eye Foundation, has with The Mess We Made all but abandoned electronica for jazz instruments, with only woozily phased fragments indicating the computer that still finished the job. Children – the David Holmes accomplice Steve Hilton, 27, and the new Polish name Pati Yang, 23, are meanwhile wired to their own private wavelength, after months in the studio.

Talking to these people, the connections in their thinking are striking, and their belief in innovation is the impressive and refreshing. "I think it's still totally possible to innovate," Hebden tells me when I meet him in his Camden flat. "I have this ambition to push as hard as I can to do stuff that sounds like my own. And it's hard, because hip hop and samples and post-modern references have existed my whole life, they're inherent in everything around me. So when I was influenced by jazz, the only way I could make it mine was to abuse it, to not give a shit about its context, and just steal its feeling. That's why hip hop is so successful – it's made by people who have an incredible understanding of music from the past, and deep disrespect when they use it. That thinking gives you the power to change music's future, to influence it yourself."

Though Hebden stripped jazz of its political ideas, he kept not only its atmosphere, but its musically fearless, questing attitude, a philosophy rife in his peers. "Free jazz was iconoclastic," Manitoba's Snaith tells me, "and me and Kieran are drawn to that element, of not being concerned by what's around you." As Children's Yang adds, "If you think that jazz means, 'get rid of rules', you can make jazz out of anything." This philosophy has then been applied to a century in which music is made with a computer's barely tapped, perhaps bottomless resources.

"The computer has the most ferocious and instant power in music now," Hebden considers. "I collect sounds from TV, records, playing guitar or anything. But I feel I'm not making music till those sounds are in the computer. The computer's the instrument: it edits and manipulates. If I want a guitar melody, I don't pick up a guitar. I take a recording of a guitar on my computer, and break it into little notes, and compose the melody with the fragments. I don't think people even know how every record's made on a computer now. Even the rawest rock is made on one."

Perhaps it's no coincidence that this year's most innovative rock, The White Stripes' Elephant, ignores this approach with its pre-1964 analog studio birth. But the thrilling part of what Hebden says is that, while John Coltrane improvised on a sax, his generation can improvise on computers with all the sound in the world. The B-side of Children's single, "Steal My Pulse", shows the possibilities. Hilton discovered its off-kilter rhythm when his computer crashed, and started to trip and improvise over what he'd programmed, as if it was a musician itself.

"You can't predict what a computer is able to do," Yang tells me, "and it's only by seeing it be imperfect, like people, that you can make it develop. It is an instrument, and its processes can be organic and subtle. We've made a mirror image of own brain, and we don't know what's happening inside, like we don't know what's happening inside our heads."

Blunders generally were valued by everyone I spoke to, Children and Snaith describing deliberately chaotic recording processes. "Things that go wrong can be as valid as what you intended to do," Hilton says. "Mistakes are always good in pushing things forward." Adds Yang: "It's when things crash that something important happens. When you break the vicious circle, and pick up what falls out. All sounds are precious."

It's this inclusive spirit that may help explain why distinctions between rock, electronic, digital and analog cease to matter when you hear this new music. Hilton and Hebden both admire Radiohead's initially reviled Kid A for sharing their values on a bigger stage. "They weren't standing between rock and electronica," Hebden observes. "They wanted to step ahead of all of it. The threads weaving those areas together are everywhere now." Manitoba and Elliott's incorporation of live musicians' intuitions indicates their digestion of rock virtues. Hebden's lone laptop improvisations supporting a Radiohead stadium tour was another way to reweave.

Hebden's analysis of his own listening habits shows how music's evaporating barriers can create new ideas, as disjunctions become connections. "I like to listen to one reggae song, then one country song, and then a jungle track. One thing completes an understanding of something else. I remember hearing people like Timbaland, and all those American R'n'B producers [admired by everyone I spoke to], making, say, a Whitney Houston record with thumb-piano on it. That attitude's become a sign of the last few years – finding clever ways to link the wrong things together. And it's so powerful, because it's pop. It's so different, yet everyone understands it straight away. I think the really fierce avant-garde experimentation of electronica acts such as Autechre sounds dated now. I've got a feeling the next Britney Spears single will sound more adventurous. And you don't need her money to do that, either. A teenager can make a record that sounds as good as anything now, on a PC that cost £500. A good idea's the most powerful thing."

As with Timbaland's production work, it's the ability to harness their own new ideas to the melodies and emotions of pop that makes the musicians I've spoken to so appealing. That, and their faith in the future. "I think saying innovation's difficult is almost irrelevant," says Hebden, "because it almost comes from another place. It's like it's waiting, out there."

Hilton agrees. "It does feel like another dimension. And on good days in the studio, you get windows on what it contains."

Matt Elliott's 'The Mess We Made' (Domino) and Children's 'Tune to Unknown' (Ramp) are out this week. Four Tet's 'Rounds' (Domino) is out 5 May