41 Longfield Street

Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) and guitarist William Tyler (Formerly of Lambchop) released an album a few weeks ago, 41 Longfield Street Late '80s (Hebden's childhood address where part of his musical upbringing was his father's collection of country and folk music). The first track on the album is the dazzling Lyle Lovett cover, If I Had A Boat, an eleven minute long, softly played melding of ambient electronics and finger picked acoustic guitar that starts out with a hum and drone which becomes ambient noise. At exactly the right moment, Tyler's guitar, buried as part of the drone and wash suddenly snaps to the fore and becomes the song. Tyler's guitar playing, delicate and melodic, two parts, a finger picked top note part and a second descending one underneath, carry the song through the next eight minutes, chords and notes that never sit still with some gentle electronics occasionally wafting in and out. 

It's followed by Spider Ballad, the least Tyler sounding track on the album, seven and a half minutes of electronic beauty, everything Kieran Hebden can do so well- a synth part that rises and falls, move around, gradually altered by FX. Underneath the four four drum prods away, a gentle propulsion. 

William Tyler said he was surprised when he heard the album, that what Kieran had done with the guitar parts they recorded together had become something else. There's a guitar in there somewhere but its not the clean finger picking of If I Had A Boat, the late 80s country gone. As the synths gather and the rhythm becomes more insistent there's an emotive ebbing and flowing, melancholy and possibility- its very evocative. 

The album was recorded together and worked on by Hebden for a two year period, Kieran adding and filtering, cutting and pasting with Tyler's very human acoustic guitar subsumed into the electronics. It's a bit disjointed, the remaining five tracks (all on side two on vinyl) taking in a variety of sounds and feels- stretched out bursts of feedback and ghostly chords (I Want An Antennae) and pastoral folk (When It Rains), a wonderfully reflective five minutes of guitar playing, two or three parts combined, that sound like they were recorded in a log cabin while staring into the flames, that dissolves into squally feedback. Timber repeats the trick, electronic flutter and acoustic guitars piling up, a ringing topline taking the lead. Loretta Guides My Hands Through The Radio is two minutes of sound collage that turns into the album's closer, Secret City, a seven minute excursion that marries Kieran's laptop electronics and Tyler's guitar perfectly, a background cloud of FX and synth drones and some guitar parts- a strummed acoustic and an electric lead both equally central to the song, a song that is sweetly euphoric, cathartic even. Magical and uplifting, Nashville and South London, late 80s and 2025. 

Find it at Bandcamp.