When it comes to Four Tet's material pre-Rounds, I'm not too hot on it. The best stuff from it, though, has a distinctively and charmingly human quality to it. When there's some jazz instrumentation and progression thrown into the mix, some pretty great stuff can be made. Dialogue contains several of these tracks spread throughout the runtime and though the album can feel bloated, there's enough solid material here to warrant a listen. Some of it is so minimalistic that it becomes a bit boring, but on tracks like "Chiron", which take organic drumming and jazz samples and juxtapose them over a minimalist house structure, things can become soothing and very enjoyable to listen to. If he had released all of his jazzier stuff from this era on one album the rating for that would be much higher, but as it stands this is the closest thing there is to that. It showed potential, that enough is certain.
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