Squarepusher

djinsomnia, Oct 15, 2001

All enigmas aside, the musical artist that is Squarepusher is actually a guy from Chelmsford, England, named Tom Jenkinson. In the last 7 or 8 years, Jenkinson has made an enormous impact on electronic music. If you look up Squarepusher in the dictionary you will find a definition that says someone who likes the ladies .... an apt description perhaps for one of electronic musics weirdest exponents.

Squarepusher is a very prolific artist ... one minute hes managing to squeeze Miles Davis-influenced jazz into drum-n-bass tracks, the next hes playing with reverb for hours, abandoning melody in favor of trippy, dubby fusion. Squarepushers first few releases were on Spymania and Rephlex. He was subsequently courted by R, Ninja Tune and Warp before signing on the dotted line with Warp.

Squarepusher began his career with Warp with a single entitled Vic Acid single which was closely followed by the album Hard Normal Daddy. Opening with Coopers World the album showed that machines could swing and that Tom could confidently take further musical risks with his arrangements. Chin Hippy on the other hand threw the listener in at the deep end as an object example of technological experimentalism. Harsh, cerebral, unique. Nevertheless Hard Normal Daddy wound up in end of year charts in magazines throughout the world moving 75,000 copies in the
process. Incidentally all payments made by Warp were returned by Toms accountant as they were out of date by the time he got around to paying them in!
"Nothing is allowed time to settle and no idea outstays its welcome... it takes at least four or five listens to absorb even the basic structures of the record" was NMEs comment on the follow-up Big Loada release. By the time it was apparent that Squarepusher had very much mastered his art so complex, wry, and exhilarating was the mini-album. Tom describes
the musical process as "...pulling the music out of nowhere, not thinking what you are doing." "You have ideas, you get in the studio, the ideas disappear and things start to flow," he explains, "the songs then exist in space somewhere between you and the machinery. When you come out you have a souvenir of your time in this psychic space, a space where
you are intuiting everything and not even worrying about things like chords and notes."

All seven tracks occupy this other worldly space. Drumnbass taken to abstraction, hovering just the right side of collapse. Harnessing the raw energy rush of the original raves but, pushing structure to the absolute limits of comprehension tracks like Full Rise and Come On My Selector (the latter recently given twisted visual accompaniment by Chris Cunningham) are benchmark moments of modern electronic music to be appreciated as both strange and beautiful abstract compositions and incendiary dancefloor tracks for the more open minded. "The rushiest, fastest breakbeat music you could still relate to...

That still had some relation funk, but remained right at the edge where it could become a meaningless piece of twat shit music" commented Tom on the mini-album in typically succinct manner. Right at the edge is exactly the place.

Tired of London Tom moved up to Sheffield early in 1998 to mix his newly finished Music Is Rotted One Note album. If Big Loada represents Tom at the peak of his programming powers then Music... is perversely both the antithesis and the next logical step. The restlessness nature of both artist and music, and his need to step ahead of the ever-growing
legion of copyists around, had led Tom to take genuine risks with this album.

All the instruments are played live, the drums forming the foundations upon which Tom has laid down all the bass and keyboard parts. There is no sequencing on this release. Dropping his trademark infinitesimal production skills in favour of these more relaxed and entirely live structures Music Is Rotted One Note is, as a consequence, Squarepushers purest musical experience to date. On his own admission the closest thing to his heart hes yet produced and yet another indication of Toms amazing musical vision. Funky, precise, loose, yet unmistakably Squarepusher Music Is Rotted One Note is born of Toms need to stimulate, challenge, and rally against any idea we might hold that music is disposable.

In other words music to make you realise quite why music can be the most important, beautiful thing in life. Squarepusher has since gone on to release the albums Budakhan Mindphone and the awesome newie Go Plastic both of which have continued to challenge the industry formula ...

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