Kieran Hebden has broken free of every convention and expectation shackled to him with his previous records. While 2003’s Rounds put the phrase “folk-tronica” on everyone’s lips, Hebden has shrugged off such sobriquets and returned with a psychedelic love letter to percussive noise with Everything Ecstatic. Recorded in a charged series of sessions, Everything Ecstatic is a passion play of electronics overwhelmed by a cacophony of drum programming. Taking a right turn from jungle with hip hop in tow, Hebden slaps several patches of high-grade blotter to breakbeat and hauls it off into the woods.
Opener “A Joy” knocks you on your ass with its panoply of drums and relentless basso rhythm while “High Fives,” a folk song for mixed percussion and DJ, is a cascade of glockenspiel and bell trees over a rumbling weather pattern of kick drum and squelchy distortion. In “Smiles Around The Face,” the closest Hebden comes to a major pop thoroughfare in his machete-trail through the wilderness, a DSP’ed percussion ensemble brings down the walls of a church so that a gospel choir is drenched in the febrile reverb of warm sunlight. The spiritual whirlwind of “Sleep, Eat Food, Have Visions” sucks up trees, cows and entire villages of mad drummers with its hallucinogenic percussive thunder. The eight minute track is Hebden’s resolute affirmation of the chaotic nature of free jazz while still exploring the cataclysmic thresholds of drum programming. Just how many tracks of staggered drumming can one get out of a piece of software before the processor melts? Hebden knows, and that’s a great deal of the appeal of his efforts on Everything Ecstatic: the man is trying new things, noisily and in public.
By the time you hear the gentle wind chimes and pellucid gong melodies of “You Were There With Me,” you have become an eager participant in the Hebden’s ritualized drum circle experience, ready to leave behind everything and follow the pulsating heartbeat of his drums. Everything Ecstatic is a pulse-bending dose of aural LSD, a sonic key that reprograms your brain to think and feel in polyrhythmic permutations.
Everything Ecstatic is out now on Domino.
