Four Tet Has Announced An All-day Event In Finsbury Park, London

Four Tet has announced an all-day event for later this year in London’s Finsbury Park. It’ll be the DJ and producer’s sole full-festival engagement this summer.

The DJ/producer whose actual name is Kieran Hebden will play a five-hour set at the open air event on Saturday, August 13, in collaboration with London organiser Krankbrother, marking his sole extended festival appearance of the season. A second stage will be present during the event, according to DJ Mag, with special performers to be announced later.

Attendees will be treated to a “beautiful tree-lined highway within Finsbury Park,” as well as natural wines and craft beers. Tickets come with a mandatory £1 donation to local environmental charities.

Single-use plastics will be outlawed, site deliveries will be kept to a minimum, and tree planting programmes will be conducted by the team engaged, all in keeping with the environmental approach.

Four Tet’s Domino albums were re-released on streaming services earlier this month, following news that he had signed a new publishing contract with Universal.

In 2001, the producer and DJ signed with Domino for the release of his second album, ‘Pause,’ and went on to release ‘Rounds’ (2003), ‘Everything Ecstatic’ (2005), and ‘There Is Love In You” (2010) on the label.

However, Four Tet announced in November that Domino had withdrawn three of those albums (‘Pause,’ ‘Rounds,’ and ‘Everything Ecstatic’) in an attempt to stop a legal case he had filed in August about previous download/streaming royalty rates.

Four Tet argues that Domino is in violation of contract over its 18% royalty rate, which was applied to record sales, and that a “fair” rate of 50% should have been applied to downloads/streams, according to the continuing case. The deal between Four Tet and Domino stipulated that record sales are subject to an 18% royalty rate, which was signed in February 2001, long before the spread of streaming platforms and the first iPod.

Domino has argued that, because digital downloads (including streams) were considered a new technology format in the early ’00s, Hebden is only entitled to 75 per cent of 18 per cent of the dealer price (i.e. a 13.5 per cent royalty rate), although it had raised it to 18 per cent on a discretionary basis.

Four Tet’s albums ‘Pause,’ ‘Rounds,’ and ‘Everything Ecstatic,’ as well as other songs, have now been restored to streaming services after a judge ordered that Four Tet’s legal team should be permitted to pursue a case for breach of contract over the albums’ removal from DSPs.

This action is in addition to the current breach of contract claim over prior royalty rates, which will now be consolidated into one litigation. ‘Nova’ and ‘Moth,’ two of Four Tet’s previous collaborations with Burial, have received their first digital release.

—Aditi Manjunath