Rounds

Hand-cut harp, guitar and found percussion give Rounds its handmade surface, while Four Tet folds those fragments into broken, asymmetric rhythm with unusual melodic patience. The album helped establish folktronica as a serious long-form idiom. Its sample logic still feels more concerned with timbre and accumulation than with obvious payoff. 'Unspoken' runs past nine minutes without a beat holding it together, and 'As Serious As Your Life' is the one that made drummers pay attention.