When Kieran Hebden isn’t releasing mind-bending music as Four Tet, you might find him experimenting under his gloriously inscrutable alter ego, ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ. Last month, he released a new album under the alias on a limited-edition vinyl pressing capped at just 2,000 copies. The digital version finally arrived on Bandcamp on July 2.
Some fans quickly ran into problems after buying the download, as the project’s deliberately chaotic metadata appeared to completely break iTunes when imported. Clarke Sondermann, aka Pleasure Systems, summed up the experience on social media: “spent $6 on the new bandcamp release from four tet’s wingdings alias and the file names are so insane it completely crashed my music app. quit and retried four times, can’t get a single one to play. well done…”
Joey from Stereogum’s Discord shared a similar experience, posting: “folks my ipod won’t add the new four tet lol even when i changed all the track names and stuff.” Meanwhile, one Reddit user titled their post: “Four Tet’s Wingding Bullshit Alias – Four Tet’s Wingding Bullshit Alias’s Unwriteable Album Title.” The album is also unscrobblable on last.fm.
Thankfully, anyone who couldn’t get the Bandcamp files working didn’t have to wait long for an alternative. The album landed on streaming services the following day. Hebden also finally acknowledged the release on Instagram yesterday, posting entirely in Wingdings and remaining completely indecipherable to me.
Beyond the music itself, which is sublime, the entire stunt is pretty hilarious. Even the Apple Music bio is in on the joke, reading: “It roughly translates as ‘mesmeric new tracks from Kieran ‘Four Tet’ Hebden.'”
Check it out below.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source stereogum.com ’
