Pause

The warm, glowing embers of gentle, pastoral acoustronica and folkstep that make up Four Tet’s second full-length release make for a tender and emotive electronic album.

Pause sees the producer improving his ability to wring a variety of moods not only from chords and melody but also from the manipulation of audio and the clever juxtaposition of seemingly disparate musical elements, timbres and textures. His use of non-electronic elements like samples that could be gamelans, thumb pianos, glockenspiels and acoustic guitars — but that could also be heavily effected synth presets — in the context of cutting-edge drum programming and sampling delivers all sorts of interesting results. Pretty sounding acoustic instruments, field recordings, found sounds, lullaby melodies and a gentle, tender approach to production, mesh together with the twitches and edits of sampling and the snap and thud of dancefloor-derived beats. Pause is earthy, clever and welcoming.