The year of Fred Again.. and Four Tet is still going strong. On Tuesday, Four Tet announced plans for the May 5 release of a new collaborative album with Fred Again.. through his label Text Records — though it won’t be himself working alongside the producer on the record, but rather Brian Eno.
“The album Secret Life by Fred again and Brian Eno is coming out on my label Text Records on Friday,” Four Tet tweeted. “It is the most beautiful album of 2023.”
There’s also a Secret Life radio station that the trio has created, though it currently only plays static-filled white noise. The broadcast goes live daily at 10 p.m. BST.
In 2014, Fred Again.. earned writing credits on Eno and Karl Hyde’s albums Someday World and High Life, in addition to producing records on the former album. Secret Life marks the 29-year-old’s first official collaborative release with his early career mentor since then.
“When I first worked with Fred I could see he was brilliant,” Eno told Apple Music last year. “It took me quite a while to think ‘Oh my gosh, this is really a new idea about how you can make music. So I learnt a lot from him.”
He added: “What I noticed with Fred is that he would start something, and he wouldn’t turn it into a loop that’s going to run through the whole track. He’d just have it running for a tiny little bit and then he’d put something else there! [His pieces] are very non-linear; he doesn’t clean everything off, so in every piece of recording, there’s a sort of context that comes with it as well. The sound has a history built into it.”
Last month, Fred Again.. brought that same entrancing creative process to Coachella alongside Four Tet and Skrillex. The trio of musicians closed out the festival’s second weekend as a last-minute replacement for Frank Ocean. The setlist included their recent collaboration “Baby Again..” and his Skrillex team-up “Rumble.”
From Rolling Stone US
