Before Four Tet joined forces with Fred Again and Skrillex in electronic music's most talked-about bromance, you'd have been far more likely to see the British artist - also known as Kieran Hebden - cosying up to Floating Points and Caribou.
As longtime friends and collaborators, the trio have been playing B2B sets and remixing each other's music since Fred Again was doing his GCSEs. This might explain why Floating Points and Caribou have gifted Hebden a new drum machine, as the producer revealed in an Instagram post shared yesterday.
"I got given a new pink drum machine from Floating Points and Caribou," the post reads. "This is my first try on it. It does loads of mad shit that I still need to work out".
The pink drum machine in question is the Soma Laboratory Pulsar-23, a four-voice, semi-modular analogue percussion synth that we described in our 2021 review as "one of the most fascinating, inspirational and - at times - bewildering electronic instruments we've tried in a long time".
As is the case with pretty much anything designed by Soma Labs head Vlad Kreimer, Pulsar-23 is a complex and idiosyncratic instrument with tons of personality; described by its maker as an "organismic" drum machine, it seeks to emulate the experience of interacting with a living organism through a non-linear workflow and an unconventional interface that invites experimentation and unpredictability.
In Hebden's video, he bobs up and down to a fidgety techno groove as he twists the dials on his Pulsar-23, tweaking the hi-hat's decay and opening the filter on a bassline produced by the machine's monophonic bass module. Running through a PLAYdifferently MODEL 1 mixer, the Pulsar-23 is sitting next to Roland TR-8 drum machine, which Hebden could well be using as a sequencer.
This isn't the first synth that Floating Points and Caribou have given to Hebden; in fact, it's not even the first Soma Laboratory machine. Earlier this year, the artist shared a video of himself playing with Soma's TERRA synthesizer, a microtonal instrument housed in a single piece of solid wood.
"I was given this synth as a gift last year from Floating Points and Caribou," the post read. "They told me they thought it was perfect for me and I’d finish making my album with it. They were right and I made Loved using it a few weeks later. Thank you Sam and Dan. You are loved."
Earlier this month, Hebden released In My Dreams, a collaboration with Ellie Goulding that started life with "a couple of voice notes" sung into an iPhone. "I found other sounds to go with it and made In My Dreams. She added some new vocal parts but we ended up keeping the voice note recordings as the main vocal," Hebden has said of the song's creation. "I guess the first take is often the most magical."
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