Hearing it in its entirety would take just shy of a week, without breaks. Still, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. I’ve been listening to it for years, at times as an idle curiosity and others as a minor obsession. Yet it would not be possible without streaming’s access to vast amounts of history’s recorded music. The playlist is a rare welcoming spot in the otherwise alienating landscape of streaming: overgrown and unruly, full of strange humanity in a place where slickness and predictability are the norm. From my perspective, the whole thing has become nearly as important to the Four Tet canon as his actual albums. ̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ) and △▃△▓ so they’d be otherwise difficult to locate on Spotify. At some point, for Hebden, it grew from a strictly curatorial outlet into a creative one: Scattered like easter eggs among the Detroit techno anthems and Jimi Hendrix demos are quite a few pieces of original music that he released specifically with the playlist in mind, using willfully abstruse aliases like ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ It asks for and earns your sustained engagement, reflecting Hebden’s vast knowledge and puckish personality in its perceptive associations between songs. This one is more like an ethnomusicology class, or an artwork unto itself. Some Spotify playlists evoke a single vivid but unobtrusive mood, softly massaging the far edges of your attention while the center is occupied with dinner party conversation or lifting weights. Within a few months, as it grew in audience and duration-he never deletes tracks, so it’s always getting bigger-he began taking it more seriously. When Hebden launched the playlist in 2016, it was something of a lark, a way to share the spoils of his crate-digging with whoever cared to listen.
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