Some years ago the Milkman was interviewing Kieran Hebden aka Four Tet for his ever-flourishing website, and he asked me for some useful questions. Which was a pretty stupid thing to do, as you can imagine, as the kinds of things which interested me weren’t exactly the kinds of things that he thought his legion of fact-hungry readers would be after. For example, one of my suggested questions was “Do you ever accidentally call someone by sitting on your phone during a meeting?”. We’ll probably never know, I’m afraid. Another question which I don’t think he put to the big-haired electronica doyen was “Considering the best thing you ever did was “Glasshead”, how come you don’t do any really long tracks any more?”.

Or maybe he did put this piece of impertinence to him, and it cut Hebden so deeply that the wound has festered for years, with this new EP being his much-delayed response. Hebden gets back to the knitting in more ways than that with the Ringer, for he has jettisoned all that avant-jazz frippery in order to return to his powerbook-powered roots. The title track unpacks its bleepy beaty wares with the ecstatic glee of a Jehova’s Witness who has been told “oh go on then, I will have a look at your selection of bibles and religious pamphlets”. They are piled up in a big wobbly tower, which is shaken to its foundations by a brief reprise of the “As Serious As Your Life” drum break. Also on here we have “Ribbons”, which is minimal house, rippling with melody; the drone-centred “Swimmer” with its phased and filtered rhythms swirling around, and “Wing Body Wing”, which with its cut-up percussion is probably the most recognisably Four Tet. All very retro, but deliciously enjoyable nonetheless; this EP may be the best thing he has produced in a wee while.

Another EP I’m going to pad out this piece with, for no better thematic reason than the fact that it too is out on Domino, is the by now traditional between-album EP from avant-popsters Animal Collective. Still on a high, both musically and in other senses most likely, after last year’s magnificent one-two combination that was Panda Bear’s Person Pitch and the Collective’s own Strawberry Jam, here they spoil us with another four glimpses into their most beguiling of self-contained worlds. “Water Curses” itself is one of their jerky-tumbly-wordy ditties, propelled along by strange internal logics and a slightly distracting melodic squeak. It finds a suitable coda in the slow “Street Flash”, which is punctuated by a pained laughter and the magnificent throaty howl last heard in “For Reverend Green”. “Cobwebs” ticks like a clock, opens to show its deceptively complex innards, and rises to a suitably chiming crescendo. From a bubbling pot rises and falls the elegiac piano of “Seal Eyeing”, closing this sparkling, if slightly more stripped down, release on a strangely subdued note.

Both are available in late April from Domino.