4 Hero
Creating Patterns

Memory. The only part of the floor that was clearly visible was the one where the shadows of the window grates in the basement were cast. Frames of luminous rectangles of an abstract greenish hue. Urban moonlight. I was sitting on a platform of pitch darkness. Soft. Actually, I had my rear on a mattress placed on the floor. My back, however, was resting on the wooden edge of a single bed. But it felt soft just the same. If I turned around, I saw everything black 100. A quadtone darkness interrupted by the perfect and rhythmic movement of a dark orange dot describing a semiellipse. And I could hear, really hear. The sound of combustion. I pointed eardrums and stirrups like directional microphones towards that glow, which, when it reached the farthest end of the semiellipse, shone with greater ardor, releasing a slight roar. After a while, the dot approached me, and I felt incredibly pleasant skin tremors like reversed stimuli. They started first, then reached the brain. And I saw myself, in 35mm. Projection source: the cerebellum. I was convinced of it. A beam of light pointed at the rest of the gray matter. I watched that red dot approach and grow larger until it became bigger than me. The vision is me, in an ashtray with closed eyes and trembling, overwhelmed by that enormous circle of inflamed ash. A sensation of single-variety pleasure that sent me into rapture. Impossible to talk about. Then a car stops outside. Bearer of good atmospheres. I speak to the determinist of the semiellipse. "I want to keep listening to this music, do you have it?" "Yes." Steps, Kenwood noises, internal volume adjustment brought to zero on the bar of external perceptions, and away.

They are 4hero of whom I knew as much as I still know about discrete mathematics. If the stereo had been Pioneer, there would have been a perfect symbiosis between the name of the machine and the content of the media. When it is difficult to surpass the avant-garde, credit must be given to merit. Merits, yes: mixing mysteries that sound in your head for the first time, like vibraphone electrolators of varied inquietudes, with musical antiques and modernisms that you have at home, freed from any redundancy; mirroring the men of that antique and modernism and seeing the image of busy men in a musical synthesis lab reflected.

4hero’s music transforms time into a non-functional tuning fork. The broken beat at the base takes on an even less linear philosophy if you want to call it untimed. There is research work, done in person, with the exploration of current sounds around music clubs (2001). It digs deep into the interstices of velvet ribs of a certain type of new jazz / new funk / new soul / urban moods & hypnocontrolled procedural visions. Without philosophies, there is a pioneering old avant-garde of drum n’ bass that captures intercultural sound stimuli in a vast ethnographic area of the United Kingdom. Which manages to protect the diverse musical identity phases without subjecting them to excessive synthetic chemistry. Which would have been out of place. The progressive and incremental vastness of sounds is sublimated with collaborations of characters who stand on the control towers of this daring musical Hadrian’s Wall, beyond which lies the unexplored. Ursula Rucker activates the spoken words mechanism increasing the rate of polymorphism of this jungle sound that never suffers from creative constipation. The nuclear independencies of the group members are intertwined by columbine ion-anion relationships that guarantee a fatal attraction for a fusion where detachment is the number one behavior rule.

It is said that this isn’t the best album by 4hero. I agree three-quarters. The other quarter is of significant importance. The concessions to new forms of music that leverage the subliminal broaden the semantic field of this work to the possible creation of personal mythologies. The sounds of 4hero are close to the sounds of man's dreams. They invite introspective vision. They invite the conception of new levels of reality. They concern 99% of things that none of us do in life.

It is since that evening that I have established a platonic correspondence with this album. Which ended for reasons of necessity. To maintain correspondences, as we know, stamps are needed.