So it’s more than a little strange that my favourite of Orton's songs should not only be from her third album, Daybreaker (which I heard well after the time at which Orton’s music was possessed of that kind of heightenedness for me, and found ‘objectively’ underwhelming into the bargain), but be a remix no less. But there it is — and it’s true, ringing, chiming and insistent, the Four Tet cut-up of “Daybreaker” is my favourite Beth track.
The thing with Four Tet remixes is that, while he very much does songs over in his own style and adorns them in the clicks, shimmers and edges that are unmistakeably his, he also always retains the integrity and the sense of the original — indeed, keeps those elements at the centre of his refashioning. And so it is here that Orton’s voice, that thorny soulful croon, is the focal point of Hebden’s “Daybreaker”, and the melody is the thread about which everything else is woven — but it’s the little twists and flourishes that he adds which really make the track…and in the commingling of the various resonances of Orton's and Hebden’s music, it takes me somewhere both familiar and new.
