Album: Four Tet, ****

Rounds, Domino

The laptop explorer Kieran "Four Tet" Hebden moves away from the "folktronica" sound of his last album, Pause (an attempt to divine what a folkie such as, say, Bert Jansch might have sounded like as a Krautrocker), to play similarly speculative games with jazz on Rounds. The residue of his interest in folk music remains in the treated fragments of instruments such as fiddle and autoharp, and in the album's title, which links the old a cappella vocal style of staggered repetition with the modern computer/sampling methodology of loops and sequences, which is at the heart of Hebden's art. The opening track, "Hands", is typical: it begins like a Steve Reich exercise, its arhythmic heartbeats giving way to inquisitive rattles of percussion and flutters of piano, like a Seventies jazz-funk piece circling around itself with wary fascination. It's more intense and involved than anything on Blur's new album, and more in tune with the possibilities of modern digital recording – a situation graphically illustrated in the ensuing "She Moves She", when the mood, carefully cultivated through sprays of Japanese koto and glockenspiel, is rudely interrupted by jagged slices of a much harsher riff, as if Hebden were switching rapidly back and forth between two separate tracks. Elsewhere, sampled harp and smears of backward synth over an asthmatic rhythm track evoke the purity, mystery and sway suggested by the title "My Angel Rocks Back and Forth"; layers of chiming guitars accrete to lend epiphanic power to "Slow Jam"; and heavy breakbeat, strummed autoharp and prancing beats combine to form the sinister funk of "As Serious as Your Life". The future starts here.