​Springy electric-socket hair, dark droopy eyes—Kieran Hebden looks like a man who has spent untold time tinkering in front of a glowing computer screen late into the night. The depth of his production work as Four Tet, however, belies the physical man-hours necessary for such precision. Every shuffle and stab unwinds easily, and even the most uncontrollably ecstatic vocal samples float unbothered over the clamor. A marked sense of restraint characterizes his productions, with any bombastic intent cloaked in some sort of undermining subtlety. "Pyramid," the outstanding original track Hebden included in the FabricLive mix he released last year, might have featured an exhilarating jumble of claves and the garbled stuttering of a spurned lover, but it also included two minutes of drum-less ambience, a calming blanket momentarily warming the dance floor.

Four Tet is a terrifyingly adept electronic producer, but it's not like he has ceased to make human contact, preferring to coo at floppy disks and converse in binary. On the contrary, he is an in-demand remixer who has lent his talents to artists as varied as the XX and Tinariwen and collaborated with Burial and Thom Yorke. Lately, he performed as part of psychedelic dance wizard Dan Snaith's Caribou Vibration Ensemble, unleashing analog synthesizer mayhem on unsuspecting crowds. This Saturday, Four Tet will perform at the long-running Mister Saturday Night party with residents Justin Carter and Eamon Harkin. Hebden was relaxed as he spoke about playing Herbie Hancock records at Low End Theory, the rhythmic lessons he took from Steve Reid, and why he avoids digital listening.

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​Every day this month, Sound of the City has been publishing pieces about Philip Glass turning 75 years old, in conjunction with the Voice's cover story on the composer. Naturally, of course, this has led to an interview with Dapwell (Ashok Kondabolu) of Das Racist, who's performing Monday night at the annual Tibet House benefit at Carnegie Hall. Glass has curated the lineup for the past 22 years, ever since he co-founded the non-profit. Also on the bill for Monday: Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Rahzel, James Blake, and Dechen Shak-Dagsay.

The questions we asked Dapwell sometimes prompted answers as sparse and spare as Glass's early composition (alas, he had jetlag). Still, we thoroughly enjoyed our chat about Tibetan independence, smoking up in Carnegie Hall, and what he imagines Philip Glass probably thinks of "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell."

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Bill Bernstein/via Facebook

​Guitarist Vernon Reid is best known as the leader of the hard rock/metal band Living Colour. Before that, though, he was a fixture on the New York avant-garde scene, blending rock, jazz and noise as a member of drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society, duetting with Bill Frisell on the album Smash & Scatteration, and co-founding the Black Rock Coalition, among many other things. He's released multiple solo albums (the first of which, 1996's Mistaken Identity, is the only album to credit both Teo Macero and Prince Paul as producers), and, this month, is premiering a multimedia performance piece, Artificial Afrika: A Tale of Lost Cities, at Dixon Place. The piece combines music and videos by Reid with contributions from DJ Leon Lamont and African vocalist Akim Funk Buddha.

In late January, I got Reid on the phone to ask about the project, its inspirations, and more.

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Still from Koyaanisqatsi

​Every day this month, in conjunction with our Feb. 1 cover story "Philip Glass, An East Village Voice," Sound of the City will post excepts of interviews with Glass and his collaborators, as well as reviews of several concerts celebrating his 75th birthday.

Earlier this week, we published our interview with Koyaanisqatsi director Godfrey Reggio, who dragged Glass kicking and screaming into film scoring. Today, we're publishing Glass's side of the story of their initial meeting, along with his thoughts on working with Errol Morris, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Woody Allen, Robert Wilson, Allen Ginsburg, Kronos Quartet, and Lucinda Childs. We also asked Glass about the claim that he writes music so that his friends can chill together, and find out why he appreciates when working relationships aren't "just one-night stands."

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​This week the Voice sat down with New York jazz titan Charles Gayle, whose new album Streets portends a man on a quest to find peace within his craft and headspace. Gayle and Tom Surgal (of local avant-jazz stalwarts White Out) go way back to the revered '80s downtown era, and the percussionist, via email, reflected on their history together. "In many ways, I've always thought that Charles's life mirrors the life of Coltrane, in that he too was lost and then he was found," Surgal said.

"Charles was floundering in his earlier life, leading a dissolute existence, and then he experienced a spiritual awakening and he was saved. And like Trane, his playing began to reflect the new found intensity of a man on a righteous path. There has always been a sense of urgency to his playing, like he was making up for lost time. And also like Trane, he has always practiced relentlessly. I know people who used to live in his old squat who claimed he never stopped playing. A lesser-known facet to Charles's personality is that he possesses enormous curiosity about the human condition. He is always studying people and has keen insights in to the way peoples' minds work. I've always thought he has the intellectual predisposition more characteristic of an author than a musician. This stirring need in him to fathom those around him no doubt feeds in to the dimensionality of his playing, help making him the consummate musician that he is."

Here, Gayle delves even deeper into Streets and his inspiring trajectory.

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Every day this month, in conjunction with our Feb. 1 cover story "Philip Glass, An East Village Voice," Sound of the City will post excepts of interviews with Glass and his collaborators, as well as reviews of several concerts celebrating his 75th birthday.

Today we're publishing the portion of our interview with Glass where we talk about black music, African American history, and how he views his music interacting with both.

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Every day this month, in conjunction with our Feb. 1 cover story "Philip Glass, An East Village Voice," Sound of the City will post excepts of interviews with Glass and his collaborators, as well as reviews of several concerts celebrating his 75th birthday.

Today we are publishing the first of several interviews with Godfrey Reggio, the director of Koyaanisqatsi (the entire film is embedded above, courtesy of Hulu) and its sequels Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi. Reggio "bothered the hell out of" Glass to drag him, kicking and screaming, into scoring his first film in the late 1970s (though Glass had previously composed music for a couple of TV projects like Sesame Street). Thirty-five years later, the two are still collaborating together, now on their fourth film the holy see, which is in post-production.

In this installment, we talk to Reggio about how he initially chose Glass as his composer, and how his team started making a film without dialogue, spoken narration, or a traditional screenplay.

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​Mister Hands, the debut album from NARC, is the sound of Balimore's Nicky Smith bisecting and pinning to cork several the electric guitar's sonic flavors: the panning-stereo patty-cake blare of "Gangrene/Snickers"; the drowsy, Drunken Master splay of "Sweater"; "Don't Touch," which bear-hugs a meat and potatoes butt-metal riff while filtering everything through a thin skein of distortion; and "Charles Rats Get It On Olson," which suggests a cross between obsessive, stress-fracture inducing scale practice on an un-tuned axe and a haunted shutter camera trying to destroy itself. Dizzying, convulsive, meditative, and downright alien in spots—"The Bomb" pensively channels teletype clicks and sci-fi FX—Hands represents a confident start to Smith's career as a songwriter, even as the world of filmmaking beckons.

SOTC emailed with Smith about Mister Hands, why he calls himself "NARC," and plans for his first feature.

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​As the Billyburg/Bushwick/Greenpoint underground overloads itself with crude art-noize slop, the clean-cut, pop-obsessive whizzes in the Red Hook-based Hospitality are quite the welcome anomaly. With an indiepop aesthetic as charming as their band name, singer/songwriter/guitarist Amber Papini, drummer Nathan Michel and bass-man Brian Betancourt jam-pack their heavenly tunes with a feathery array of hook-filled jangle, orchestral shimmers and catchy la-la's and ooh-ooh's. The chanteuse-like Papini is irresistible, slinging her axe and outlining her dreamy vision of New York in an unmistakable voice sure to inspire quite a few indie boy crushes, especially in the wake of her band's Merge debut coming out.

Sound of the City spoke to Papini on the phone from her beloved Red Hook to talk about all things Hospitality.

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Every day this month, in conjunction with our Feb. 1 cover story "Philip Glass, An East Village Voice," Sound of the City will post excepts of interviews with Glass and his collaborators, as well as reviews of several concerts celebrating his 75th birthday.

Today we're publishing our interview with Atlanta-based dj BC (a.k.a. Bob Cronin), whose album Glassbreaks mashed up The Beastie Boys' "Pass The Mic" with Glass's Einstein on the Beach (resulting in "Einstein On The Beast," above), Lil' Jon & the Eastside Boyz's "I Don't Give A Fuck" with Glass's pharaonic opera Akhnaten ("Lil' Tut"), and Kanye West, Talib Kweli and Common's "Get 'Em High" with "Evening Song" from Glass's Satayagraha ("Evening High").

Glass's musical use of repetition—which predated the DJ scene by some time—made it a perfect fit for mixing with rap and hip-hop. We talked to dj BC about this synchronicity, his fleeting encounters with Glass, and why he wasn't bitter when Glassbreaks was pulled.

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