KH

Kieran Hebden, the British producer and electronic musician widely recognized under the alias Four Tet, has put out several of his most prominent club and festival tracks using just his initials as KH. Among them are “Only Human” from 2019 and “Looking at Your Pager” from 2022, both of which circulated widely through his DJ sets long before sample clearances allowed official versions to emerge.

From the point he started issuing material as Four Tet in the late 1990s onward, Hebden’s output has merged live and synthesized elements while drawing on sources that stretch from hip-hop and ambient music to folk and spiritual jazz. During the 2000s he made occasional forays into more dance-oriented material, most noticeably through remixes and the 2008 release Ringer EP. A piece credited to KH under the title “101112” was included on Four Tet’s FabricLive 59 mix. Hebden subsequently began pressing white-label singles for his own Text label, among them joint efforts with Burial and with Thom Yorke of Radiohead as well as a split release alongside Daphni, also known as Caribou. Early in 2013 Text issued a KH single whose full title reads “The Track I’ve Been Playing That People Keep Asking About and That Joy Used in His RA Mix and Daphni Played on Boiler Room,” anchored by an African vocal chant. The U.K. garage-styled “BACK2THESTART,” said to have been written during a flight, followed digitally in 2015. Another frequently requested DJ-set item, “Question,” surfaced in 2017; essentially an edit of Bobby Powell’s 1971 funk recording of the same name. “Only Human,” constructed from samples taken from Nelly Furtado’s “Afraid,” arrived in 2019 after Hebden and other selectors had already road-tested it in clubs. Released through Ministry of Sound, the track quickly became a fixture at venues and festivals and remains Hebden’s most played piece. The second Ministry of Sound single under the KH name, a 3LW-sampling track called “Looking at Your Pager,” appeared in 2022.