Squarepusher - The intelligent chameleon

The time frame in which Tom Jenkinson's work is situated is defined by a musical landscape, especially in the electronic field, deeply marked and inextricably linked to the "intelligent" revolution heralded by Aphex Twin in 1992 and officially unveiled with the Warp Records manifesto, the "Artificial Intelligence" series. A revolution based, in its early stages and in its later development, on the search for a symbiotic fusion of opposite and contrasting elements (ambient and techno, melody and rhythm, analog and digital, euphoria and stillness), drawing simultaneously on classical avant-garde movements, on rock avant-gardes (kraut-rock, industrial), on the ambient music of Brian Eno and on the most extreme fringes of techno (rave, acid-house).

Having completed its gestation, this new musical form, after first merging with matter to give birth to its firstborn, ambient-techno, went on to establish itself as a genre in its own right (Intelligent Dance Music), before spawning two further new sonic strands: drum 'n' bass and breakbeat, both derived mainly from rave influences and characterized by very similar rhythmic-melodic structures, distinguished from one another by the instruments used (in the former, almost exclusively bass and drums, both real and electronically reproduced) and, above all, by tempo (considerably faster in breakbeat).

Crucial to this true evolution of electronic music was the work of artists tied, in particular, to three record labels: the aforementioned Warp, Mike Paradinas's Planet-Mu, and Richard David James's Rephlex Records. The latter, in particular, acted as a genuine talent-scout, launching names such as Paradinas himself, Luke Vibert, Mike Dred, Jeremy Simmonds and Chris Jeffs. But the English label's last great discovery was a particularly singular figure, impossible to pigeonhole: a bassist with a love of electronic treatment (glitch and the digital age were still to come), a sound manipulator shaped by nights spent raving, yet with a soft spot for jazz. This was the then twenty-one-year-old Tom Jenkinson, though we would all come to know him under his main alias: Squarepusher.

Multi-instrumentalist, self-taught, exuberant: these three words sum up Jenkinson's persona, and the last of them in particular clearly defines his musical soul — an element that, over the course of his career, would prove to be both his greatest asset and his biggest limitation. Among Warp's standard-bearers, Squarepusher would in fact end up being neither an innovator and pioneer, as, say, Aphex Twin, Autechre and Boards Of Canada were, nor the cornerstone of any particular movement: his is an art of extreme variety, of radical and sudden changes of direction, at times almost inconceivable ones. Eclecticism is the primary element of Squarepusher's music, a constant renewal rarely tied to any progressive stylistic evolution.

Raised on a diet of jazz, he soon gravitated toward electronic music, at first following the Detroit techno scene with interest, then falling in with the "intelligent" movement. After a few remixes and a fairly modest career as a DJ, Jenkinson began producing his own music, initially releasing two EPs under his own name on various independent labels. Of the two, only the first has survived to reach us, Crot, from 1994: a work steeped in rave and acid-house sounds, somewhere between early Aphex Twin and 808 State, especially in the two halves of "The Burglar". It is not yet, however, a particularly striking example of where his career would later head, still quite far removed from the drum 'n' bass influences that would go into the recipe behind his best work.

A year goes by, and two more extended plays arrive, Alroy Road Tracks, under the moniker Duke Of Arringay, and Conumber, his first release under the Squarepusher name: two jazz-fusion digressions, both sparing in electronic elements, but more indicative of what would become one of the Welshman's defining traits.

1996 is the turning point in Jenkinson's career: after two strictly limited-edition EPs for Worm Interface, one of them alongside the little-known indie-electronic artist Nigel Smith (aka Dunderhead), he is approached by Rephlex, who had been struck by hearing Alroy Road Tracks, and signed to the label. Just two months later, under the alias Squarepusher, he releases his debut album.

Feed Me Weird Things is the starting point — still not fully fleshed out — of what would probably be the best version of Squarepusher: Jenkinson's bass playing and his jazz roots are the dominant elements in half the tracks, while electronic sound experimentation defines the rest. The interplay of the two elements unfolds, still somewhat unripe though remarkably "new", across the entire record. The opening "Squarepusher Theme" lays out the path the whole album follows: a breakneck, schizoid rhythmic base, typically drum 'n' bass, wraps around a be-bop- and funk-tinged tableau, led from the front by an unusual melodic bass.

Following the same path are the spectral, dark jazz march of "The Swifty", the free-jazz theatrics of "Smedleys Melodies", the martial post-bop of "Windscale 2" and the soft-funk of "Kodak".

The remaining tracks, meanwhile, belong to a purely electronic realm: the acid breakbeat of "Dimotane Co.", the mechanical elegy of "North Circular", which is not too distant a cousin of Autechre's noisier turn, the manically sugary jukebox frenzy of "Theme For Ernest Borgnine" (somewhere between the more melodic side of Aphex Twin and µ-Ziq's "Tango N' Vectif") and the closing acid-jungle of "Future Gibbon". "UFO's Over Leytonstone" and "Goodnight Jade", finally, are passages with a markedly ambient character: the former hypnotic and dub-inflected, the latter light and melancholic.

Squarepusher's debut is disorienting more for the sheer multiplicity of elements it contains than for any particular reinvention of them: one of the most atypical albums in the entire intelligent scene, it leaps masterfully between the most varied musical forms, though it still amounts to a statement of intent rather than a genuine development of them. That development would instead come with the following album, the creative and artistic peak of Jenkinson's career.

Feed Me Weird Things established the Welshman as the new name in both nineties electronic music and jazz-fusion at once: this first album, in fact, does not yet make clear which of the two is the dominant element, an ambiguity resolved in the methodical symbiosis of his second record. Even so, fusion, originally born as a meeting point between jazz and rock, finds in Squarepusher a new path, that of "fusing" with a form of electronic music about as far removed from canonical jazz as can be; and this, without any doubt, is the true great innovation brought about by Jenkinson's work, even more than his electronic ambitions, clearly inspired by the intelligent scene but never quite able to bring any particular innovation to the genre itself.

Alongside the album, Rephlex releases the EP Squarepusher Plays…, containing the LP's overture and two outtakes included exclusively on the Japanese edition of the same record: this is Jenkinson's second and final release for the label, since, as already happened with names like Luke Vibert and Aphex Twin himself, that same year Warp Records swoops in to secure exclusive rights to his output, signing him and adding him to its already well-stocked roster of big names.

This new marriage, which endures to this day, opens with the release of the EP Port Rhombus, a small collection of drum 'n' bass sounds with a pronounced dark-funky aftertaste, a forewarning of his second full-length, his first for Warp. Hard Normal Daddy arrives just a few months after the EP and stands as the true manifesto of Squarepusher at his best: a fusion of complex, frenetic rhythms, jazz harmonies and biting acid languor on the surface, from which Jenkinson branches out into totally unrelated and distant sonic languages, showing his greatest gift to be the ability to keep them all in balance.

"Cooper's World", tasked with opening the dance, is a melodic, driving post-bop piece, fuelled by extremely fast, tightly structured analogue beats, while "Beep Street" temporarily drifts into a vaguely ambient path, before giving way to the pure drum and acid of "Rustic Raver", somewhere between Luke Vibert and Cylob. "Anirog D9", a jungle ballet built on strings, anticipates the foray into the noisy, almost musique-concrète industrial of "Chin Hippy" and the acid-jazz portrait à la James Taylor that is "Papalon".

The acidic miniature "E8 Boogie" is shaken by a cascade of bass feedback, before, on "Fat Controller", Jenkinson opts for yet another jarring swerve, with a rock-leaning rhythm and a guitar twisted between metallic distortions and piercing echoes reminiscent of Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music".

"Vic Acid" is a formal definition of drum 'n' bass in its most classic form, and "Male Mill, Pt. 13" carries on the same theme, gradually introducing an ambient-jazz melody that builds to a powerful conclusion. Closing things out are the soft-jazz divertissement "Rat P's And Q's" and the brisk, delicate "Rebus", an ethereal, candid ambient-techno pastiche and the most intimate, relaxed track on the record.

Squarepusher's second effort presents and blends Jenkinson's sonic trademarks, achieving, thanks to a variety built on a solid common foundation, a balance the Welshman will never manage to replicate again, letting himself be swept away all too readily by his musically multipolar spirit. Continuing to carve out a highly personal path, rooted in the work of most of the Idm pioneers yet always able to set itself notably apart from them, Squarepusher produces what is probably his best album, perhaps the only one that can fully be called a masterpiece, a feat he will struggle greatly to repeat in the future: carried by his many influences into changing course with every record (or even within a single record), he will end up losing, along with most of his best ideas, the very balance he achieved on this, his second album.

If, indeed, the small-yet-great revolution that had launched him (especially on the first album) was the attempt (fully successful here) to forge a new musical form fusing his jazz roots with the findings of the 1990s electronic scene, this approach, completed and best formalised precisely on Hard Normal Daddy, will be almost entirely set aside starting with the following Music Is One Rotten Note. What will change instead, radically and with every release, are the territories explored by his research, often too far removed from one another and from the common ground that had managed to keep them so well balanced. More than an excess of variety of references, it will be his inability to stay consistent with them that keeps Squarepusher from raising the level of all his releases, which will often turn out well-crafted and full of ideas worth developing, only to be promptly abandoned in favour of radical changes of direction, or undermined by just as many overreaching ambitions.

Despite this, Hard Normal Daddy, also given its position as his first (and only) fully realised work representing a style that is coherent and linear in its evolution, can be considered his masterpiece and one of the highest peaks of the entire Idm scene.

That same year, the EP Big Loada shows a Squarepusher far removed from his previous output, grappling with Kraftwerk-esque echoes ("A Journey To Reedham"), vintage µ-Ziq-style larks ("Massif") and forays into the most hammering breakbeat ("Full Rinse" and "Come On My Selector").

A kind of bow to his masters, it's an interim work, by no means indicative of where his activity will head next, a sort of "pause" before picking his main project back up.

Rounding off the year is also the compilation Burningn'n Tree, which gathers the EPs released with Spymania (Conumber and Alroy Road Tracks) plus a handful of unreleased tracks dating back to Jenkinson's early days, echoing the colourful funk of the two mini-albums.

Squarepusher's third album arrives in 1998 and is titled Music Is One Rotten Note. It marks a total shift towards a sound torn between jazz and avant-garde ambitions, as well as being the first in a series of lacklustre, mutually contradictory episodes. A genuine crowning of the Welshman's most eclectic side, it abandons almost entirely any electronic scoring in favour of developing electro-acoustic sections. The opening one-two of "Chunk-S"-"Don't Go Panic" is fully representative of all this: two dives into pure jazz-fusion territory, a hair's breadth from Weather Report, with the multi-instrumentalist indulging himself on bass, drums, keyboards and percussion. The dark omens of "Dust Switch", on the other hand, come much closer to the Canterbury-scene intuitions of Soft Machine and Caravan, while "Curve 1" and "137 (Rinse)" embrace, with no success whatsoever, a noisy, near-dissonant avant-garde, amid sampling, distortion and sudden electric flashes.

"Parallelogram Bin" is a pointless, brief staccato of pure musique-concrète sampling, as are "Ruin" and "Step 1". The avant-jazz of "Circular Flexing" and "III Descent" abstracts itself from the earthbound dimension of the Squarepusher sound, veering towards pure, conceptual experimentation, this time pulled off admirably. Things return to more tangible ground with the picturesque slow funk of "My Sound" and its hypnotic gait, and with the record's creative peak, "Theme from Vertical Hold", a frosty, modal acid-jazz ride with mysterious, desolate tones. Standing apart from the rest of the record, meanwhile, are "Shin Triad", an acoustic-ambient take on drum 'n' bass ambitions, and "Last Ap Roach", an unsettling, extremely slow minimal march with a dark-ambient feel à la Raison D'Etre.

If Hard Normal Daddy can be considered the most complete and balanced manifesto of Squarepusher at his best, Music From One Rotten Note instead fully embodies the contradictions that will mark much of the Welshman's career going forward. Alternating sonic seeds ready to blossom into a jazz-fusion revolution and intriguing, restless digressions with sketchy, mostly ill-judged attempts to experiment by pushing out towards the shores of a bland, insubstantial avant-garde, the third chapter in the Squarepusher saga ends up an unfinished work, a potentially excellent album undermined by its creator's excessive eagerness to leap ahead of the distance his research had actually covered, ending up planted simultaneously in several areas without managing to fully develop any of them. The excellent craftsmanship of at least half the tracks (along with the short length of the weaker episodes) manages to raise its overall level, making it, in spite of itself, yet another demonstration of overflowing creativity — albeit one undermined by marked excess, and thus far from the precarious and (precisely because of that) extraordinary balance of Hard Normal Daddy.

A temporary return to Rephlex closes out the year, with the release, under the moniker Chaos A.D., of an album, Buzz Caner, and an EP containing some of his remixes. A kind of first real approach to the most extreme acid-house, straddling Mike Dred, 808 State, LFO and the early Aphex Twin EPs, it mostly serves as a small gift to the label that first launched him: the album contains no evolution or reinterpretation of that formula whatsoever, with its tracks instead simply retracing its typical sounds with a healthy dose of technical mannerism.

The following year opens with the release of Budakhan Mindphone, initially presented as a new album but later reclassified, given its brevity, as an extended play. It essentially serves as a surrogate for the best explorations of Music Is One Rotten Note, with the near-total abandonment of skits and concrete-music excursions and a greater development of the avant-jazz component (“The Tide”, “Splask”, “Varkatope”), a nostalgic and fleeting return to his native Idm homeland (“Fly Street”, “Gong Acid”) and the presence of one of his most intimate tracks, the melancholic and touching ambient-dub fresco “Lambic 5 Poetry”, somewhere between Biosphere, Michael Stearns and the “master” Aphex Twin's “Selected Ambient Works II”. By cutting out those expeditions into no man's land capable of ruining the best ideas of the previous record, with this little gem Jenkinson manages, if only temporarily, to get back on firmer ground and refocus his inspiration.

But just a few months later, a new EP, Maximum Priest, reawakens the doubts that had seemed left behind: the excellent ambient-dub incursion of “Song: Our Unwater Torch” is followed by the furious, flavourless drum ‘n’ bass dance of “Decathion Oxide”, by a sort of acoustic, slowed-down version of it that gains nothing from the treatment (“You’re Going Down”) and by the 32 pointless seconds of screams and glitch shivers of “Cranium Oxide”. It's the antechamber to the next, hallucinatory chapter of the Squarepusher saga.

Selection Sixteen arrives barely three months after Maximum Priest and is once again an album that's anything but short of excellent ideas, yet it's literally torn apart by a climate of total incoherence and superficiality in handling them. On top of that, there's once again an extremely forced coexistence of every musical form tackled previously (with electronics this time the absolute protagonist at the expense of jazz), with the addition of further forays into psychedelia and pure avant-garde. The result is a collection of extremely rapid sketches (fewer than half the tracks run over two minutes), moreover totally detached and at odds with one another, never able to leave a mark or treat their material beyond a mere glance.

The best results are found in the more "accessible", conventional tracks, closer to the late, lamented mood of Hard Normal Daddy, such as the teeming beat-factories “Square Rave” and “Mind Rubbers”, the crystalline ambient-techno of “Dedicated Loops”, the Autechre-esque “Tomorrow World” and the psychedelic bass of “Freeway”.

As for the rest: more failed forays in search of the avant-garde, such as the opening “The ‘Eye”, for solo drums and a few acid echoes, the jazz-noise of “Schizm Track #1”, the dissonant icon “Yo”; electronic pastiches with neither head nor tail, among which stand out the horrendous analogue machine-gun fire of “Time Borb”, the comically clumsy dance of “Snake Pass”, which aims for μ-Ziq but ends up sounding rather like the latter's dismal collaboration with Richard James, and the harmless vintage breakbeat of “Acid Tape Track”. But the album hits rock bottom with the penultimate twenty seconds of “Tesko”: a jaunty jazz backing over which samples of human screams, grunts, belches and all manner of other noises take turns: something meant to amuse that only ends up being terribly grating.

Selection Sixteen can be considered the electronic companion piece to the jazz-inflected Music Is One Rotten Note: it shows the same problems (exuberance, excessive ambition) and falls into the very same mistakes (superficiality, lack of development and coherence), with the difference that it can't boast that half-album of excellent tracks that had kept the other record's stock up. Jenkinson manages the difficult feat of disowning that innovative symbiosis of extremes that had made Hard Normal Daddy's fortune, and of being overwhelmed by his own creative frenzy.

Two years pass before Squarepusher resurfaces. What might look like a temporary halt in the Welsh musician's photosynthetic creative flow should instead be seen as a genuine period of reflection: after the painful flop of Selection Sixteen, Jenkinson sharpens his tools again and, aided by what was likely some self-criticism, manages to refocus his flamboyant creativity, without giving up either the variety or the touch of showmanship that have always been indelible traits of his art. What results is his second-best achievement after Hard Normal Daddy, and finally a compact, unified record. Go Plastic comes out in 1999 and once again marks a sharp turn, a total change of direction, a 180-degree reversal.

The first real novelty of this new Squarepusher is the total renunciation of any jazz influence and of the pompous drum ‘n’ bass frenzy: in their place, a measured, almost minimal breakbeat, coated in samples and hypnotic patterns. The opening pair “My Red Hot Car”-“Boneville Occident”, with its female voices, alchemical beats and the occasional splash of acid here and there, already shows where Jenkinson's explorations are now anchored, namely somewhere between the Idm of the latter-day Autechre (from “TriRepetae++” to “Confield”), the conceptual minimal scene (Alva Noto and Ryoji Ikeda) and the hypnotic deep-house of Global Communication. “Go Spastic!” accentuates the minimal elements, while the brief “Metteng Excuske V1.2” is a concrete-music divertissement, a short return to his “avant-garde vices” that nonetheless manages to find a sense of place within the whole.

The slow, hammering march of “The Exploding Psychology” precedes the Aphex Twin-esque “I Wish You Could Talk”, before leaving the listener to the frenetic, Cylob-style noise of “Greenways Trajectory”. Once again a brief watercolour, this time of an ambient bent and of rare beauty, “Tommib”, introduces the closing pair, “My Fucking Sound”-“Plaistow Flex Out”, which closes the record with a slow, martial, almost silent deep-house.

Go Plastic seems to be the mature, self-aware album of an artist able to pick himself back up after a fall, producing, for the first time in his career, a work that is homogeneous and stylistically unified, though not without a fitting, measured dose of nuance. Where every previous release of his had been able to tackle ever more varied and far-flung territories, marrying and divorcing continuously from different styles and influences, at first with excellent results and later sliding into self-indulgence and excess, Go Plastic focuses on developing a single area, the electronic one, adapting its sound to the trends of the new millennium (glitch and minimal replacing Idm and ambient-techno), while keeping its pronounced drum ‘n’ bass roots intact. Inferior to Hard Normal Daddy only for lacking its enormous wealth of ideas and groundbreaking stature, the album represents something like its ideal opposite and stands, in any case, as one of Squarepusher's finest outings. But the belief that Go Plastic might represent his long-awaited creative maturity would prove illusory, because this new, placid equilibrium wouldn't last long.

The album's huge success with both audiences and critics in fact rekindles the inspired ecstasy of years past, through which Jenkinson once again starts flooding the market, almost managing to release an album a year. The novelty, though, is the abandonment of the EP format: all his subsequent releases will be full-length albums. This new "whirlwind" kicks off in 2002 with the inconclusive, even in its title, Do You Know Squarepusher?. This question conceals, at once, the eternal query that every new record makes harder to answer affirmatively, and a fresh doubt that arises instantly and feels more than confirmed after listening to the album: that perhaps, before anyone else, it is Jenkinson himself who doesn't know Squarepusher, if the latter can be considered his wildly varied, eclectic musical soul, more often than not able to overpower his own personality. A soul capable of producing magnificent chapters when properly reined in, but just as capable of ruining excellent ideas when let off the "leash". A situation already experienced before, a limitation that had seemed overcome on Go Plastic but resurfaces, more relevant than ever, on this record too. Which, it should be said, is anything but a bad album: once again it's a collection of good stylistic exercises and a few flashes of genius, but once again these elements prove disconnected from one another and thrown together, with not the slightest care, into the same space.

The album confirms the "new Squarepusher"'s fully electronic drift, though it changes course once again, embracing, for three-quarters of the record, on one hand a total claustrophobic abstraction (rather similar to what Autechre attempted with “Confield”), and on the other an entirely rhythmic-industrial cliché (abandoning the deep minimalism of Go Plastic), only to then close with three tracks bearing no relation whatsoever to what came before them.

The opening title track is the only episode that seems to recall its excellent predecessor, while the robotic, abstract (and unsuccessful) experiment of “F-Train”, the violent pattern-clash of “Kilk Robot” and the frenzied, oblique downpour of “Anstromm-Feck 4” fall fully in line with an Autechre-esque revisiting of Go Plastic's minimalism: a treatment that once again manages to tear down the equilibrium previously achieved, producing three good tracks of intelligent pedigree, though totally devoid of the grandiloquent elegance that pervaded that record.

But the delirium and the contradictions reach their peak in the closing trio: first yet another pointless avant-garde noise sticky note (“Conc 2 Symmetriac”), then a ten-minute suite that begins under the banner of droning ambient, before being bombarded by a hailstorm of violently harsh electronic distortions, only to land, in closing, on lunar terrain dear to the Tangerine Dream of “Electronic Meditation”: a true masterpiece, perhaps the most innovative track Jenkinson has ever composed, a sarcastic fusion of present (Idm and digital development), past (industrial and kraut) and future (drone, noise and glitch). A perfect album closer, one that alone would have raised the record's overall quality enormously. Instead, the role of farewell falls to a cover of Joy Division's “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, with a sound, moreover, of clearly New Order-ish stamp, not remotely successful and utterly out of place within the context of the album, where the final impression is that every single track clashes, stylistically and musically, with all the others.

The final impression is that we're faced with an album in which, more than ever, Jenkinson's question is aimed exclusively at himself: after all, who really knows Squarepusher? With this record, the Welsh musician proves that, if such knowledge exists, it's certainly not mutual in most cases: it's yet another triumph of Squarepusher over Jenkinson, one that ends up being far more painful for the latter, who, as had already happened (within a completely different sonic framework) on Music Is One Rotten Note, throws away the chance to create another great record, one that could have been enriched by the presence of a genuine musical treatise, managing instead to produce only a compilation that is, in places, good but wildly uneven.

The release of Do You Know Squarepusher? is followed by intense and constant live activity, well documented in the bonus edition of the aforementioned album, and by a steady growth in popularity. This latest development will prove fundamental for Jenkinson in composing his seventh album, which will come out in 2004, carrying forward the non-stop flow begun with Go Plastic.

Ultravisitor is, from the cover artwork alone, already a statement of change, this time in personal approach as well as in the music. Jenkinson's face appears on the cover for the first time, announcing a particular new confidence on the Welshman's part: the shadowy, mysterious man of a thousand personalities now reveals himself and, for the first time, produces an album aimed at the audience, at the fans, at listening pleasure, rather than at experimentation or at satisfying his insatiable stylistic hunger. And so Ultravisitor is a uniform album (though not giving up the usual wildly varied cameo appearances), more conventional, decidedly more "accessible", almost "catchy". An album that stands as a sort of summary of all the experiences tackled over the course of his career, a manifesto for anyone wanting to approach his music.

The title track, once again the opener, inherits almost everything from Aphex Twin's "Richard D. James Album", with acid beats, patterns and synth expanses; while what emerges in the bass solo of "I Fulcrum" is an unprecedented acoustic side, the same one that pervades the guitar watercolor of "Andrei", the brief and melancholy "Tomibb Help Buss" and the disarmingly limpid closing gem "Every Day I Love", performed on classical guitar. There's also no shortage of nostalgic returns to jazz-fusion, such as the sweet "Lambic 9 Poetry", the bluesy bass of "C-Town Smash", the rhythmic solo "Circlewave" and the Canterbury-style jam "Tetra-Sync".

The usual incursions into experimental territory, represented by the glitch bow to Chris Watson on "An Arched Pathway", by the field recordings of "Menelec" and by the proto-kraut "District Line II", manage this time not to disappoint in the slightest. The best results, in any case, come with the more "electronic" and "restless" tracks: the horror-theater breakbeats of "Steinbolt", reminiscent of Aphex Twin's "drukQs" and late-period LFO, and the spectral alien march of "50 Cycles", arriving straight from the ultraworld.

Ultravisitor is not, as it might mistakenly seem, either a new great album or yet another hoped-for attainment of balance: it is, rather, definitive proof of just how incompatible that term is with Squarepusher's musical soul. It is, however, a work in which spontaneity is dosed with care, where Jenkinson puts Squarepusher to use rather than unleashing its exuberance — an operation that in most artists would coincide with a loss of personality, and would therefore be a negative, but which in the Welshman's case turns out, exceptionally, to be essential. Stylistic variety here is an integral part of a deliberate project, rather than the fruit of uncontrolled digressions, and above all, the territories explored, while not lacking in mannerism, are described and interpreted flawlessly, without the lapses of taste seen previously. What's missing from this album are the sparks, flashes and intuitions found in most of its predecessors (even the less successful ones), but their necessary sacrifice in exchange for a reining-in of the eclectic streak ultimately proves decisive to the record's success.

Ultravisitor serves, just as its author had hoped, as a calling card to the public (it could be called his first "commercial" album), one that follows him uninterruptedly throughout 2005, a year spent amid numerous live sets around the world. After an initial career phase devoted to total introversion and to producing decidedly niche works, Jenkinson kicks off a second phase much more geared toward extroversion, without however giving up his theatrical variety: this formula characterizes an excellent new chapter, Hello Everything, for the first time an album that follows in the footsteps of its predecessor rather than marking the usual about-face.

On this new record, Jenkinson gives up all the previous albums' jagged experimental ambitions: from his past, only the solid drum 'n' bass foundation remains, now combined with a run of catchy melodic lines, sometimes sweet, sometimes more aggressive, and with a few jazz elements of a particularly soft nature. The opener "Hello Everything" is a sugary, wildly varied little dance number, in a style that would later be tackled to best effect by Hudson Mohawke many years later, while the glossy jazz-pop of "Theme From Sprite" is Jenkinson's eloquent statement of intent, a farewell to the modal references of "Hard Normal Daddy" and a new marriage, among other things, with pop.

"Bubble Life" and "Planetarium" focus more on ambient textures, without however doing without a very vintage-sounding melodic section; the same goes for the beautiful, kaleidoscopic anthem "Welcome To Europe", while the only outright digressions into ambient territory are the acoustic "Circlewave 2" (an ideal follow-up to the同-titled track from Ultravisitor, with markedly Eno-esque echoes) and the dark "Vacuum Garden". There's also no shortage of the "usual" rhythmic catharses, represented by the frenetic breakbeat of "The Modern Bass Guitar" (once again very LFO), by the acid-industrial medley of "Rotate Electrolyte" and by the jazzed-up hardcore of "Plotinus".

Bringing things to a close, somewhat as happened on Do You Know Squarepusher?, is a 10-minute suite that stands completely apart from the rest, "Orient Orange", a genuine dark litany of ritual-ambient squarely in Zero Kama territory: the best possible ending for what is another excellent record, decidedly more focused than its predecessor and successful in almost every part. An album that continues down the path of the progressive "standardization" of Jenkinson's sound, the most measured and uniform yet (even more so than Go Plastic), one that manages to fill the few gaps left by its predecessor and stands as the best synthesis of the new Squarepusher: mainstream but not too much so, multifaceted yet concise, hugely inspired yet properly reined in, it marks another (the third) creative peak — though one followed, once again, by a collapse.

A collapse that materializes less than a year later with Just A Souvenir, a genuine slide into pure electro-pop territory. A record that seems to have been composed for the sole purpose of riding "the crest of the wave" reached a year earlier, pleasing the fans and Warp alike while also satisfying his wallet; in an attempt to disguise this intent, Jenkinson and Warp build a story around the album, according to which the songs were inspired by a dream in which a rock band played a gig amid incredible settings (on a kayak in the middle of a river, or behind an enormous, precariously tilting coat rack, with the guitar speeding up and slowing down on its own and the drum parts swapping places with one another).

The album is split evenly between heavily forced funky-pop marches, such as the ouverture "Star Time 2", the acid frenzy of "The Glass Road" and the funk of "Duotone Moonbean" or "Quadrature", and nods to easy, chart-friendly pop-rock (complete with vocoder-filtered vocals) in the new wave echoes of "The Coathanger", in the Kraftwerk-esque electro of "A Real Woman" or in the rock-leaning winks of "Delta-V". Added to these are two exercises in Prodigy-style big-beat ("Planet Gear" and "Tensor In Green"), likewise markedly tuneful and easy on the ear, three very brief classical-guitar instrumentals ("Open Society", "Fluxgater" and the closing "Yes Sequitur"), and a soft-jazz vignette over a distorted backdrop ("The Glass Road").

Just A Souvenir can be regarded, depending on one's point of view, as yet another fruit of Squarepusher's exuberance (which this time led him to overdo the "commercializing" of his music), or as a deliberate operation aimed at reinventing his persona, also given his evident awareness that the IDM movement had reached its end, its fundamental insights now serving as the foundation for new electronic-experimentation scenes but no longer representing the innovative frontiers they had been in the Nineties. Considering the subsequent developments in Jenkinson's career, both theories can be considered valid, though in the case of this Just A Souvenir, the second seems the more plausible.

Nonetheless, the album is a great success and becomes by far Squarepusher's best-seller, turning him from chameleonic experimenter into purveyor of a slick, broadly appealing formula. But a fresh outburst of the Welshman's untamable, theatrical spirit seems to reject this role. So, after a year's "break", Squarepusher returns in 2009, attempting twice to change course once again. The first of these attempts is the unsuccessful EP Numbers Lucent, a nostalgic rehash of IDM clichés and sticky, aimless melodies, with the remarkable novelty of a pronounced tendency toward self-quotation. The next turn belongs to what we can fairly consider a side project, as well as the most conceptual album of his career: a collection of (mostly) short instrumentals for electric bass titled Solo Electric Bass 1. The impression is that this is the album Jenkinson had always been waiting to make, even before his debut Feed Me Weird Things took shape. The compositions are largely improvised, delicate and abstract pieces, straddling jazz languor and, for the very first time, a certain leaning toward a classical idiom. This is decidedly not an album that leaves a lasting mark, though it does offer listening of high technical caliber, one that, however, often ends up slipping into apathy.

After this temporary excursion down paths even further removed from what had come before, and the further (though at this point decidedly unnecessary) proof of the undying conflict between his stylistic-creative exuberance and the attempt to rein it in, Jenkinson temporarily puts Squarepusher on ice to devote himself to a new project: an actual band, complete with two guitars, keyboards and drums, in which he limits himself solely to the role of singer (still aided by the vocoder) and bassist. The group, which takes the name Shobaleader One, releases in 2010 its first and, to date, only album, d'Demonstrator, a blend of big beat, chill-out, math elements and plenty of pop melody.

The record has its ups and downs — few outright failures but no real sparks either — thanks to a varied but largely recycled formula running through almost every track. Among the best moments are the icy, crystalline math-pop of "Into The Blue", the liturgical instrumental "Frisco Wave", the ride somewhere between Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode that is "Cryptic Motion", the robot love song "Abstract Lover" and the closing techno-industrial of "Maximum Planck", the one true creative peak, with echoes of Battles. Standing out for the wrong reasons, however, are the various attempts at pop adaptation, such as the saccharine opening r'n'b of "Plug Me In", which sounds like a Rihanna track given the electronic treatment, the melodic big beat of "Laser Rock", the tribal electro-rock à-la-Chemical Brothers of "Megazine" and the dance collage of "Endless Night".

The double side-step of this new project and its predecessor Solo Electric Bass 1 sounds like a warning bell that shouldn't be taken lightly: could even Jenkinson, that bottomless well fuelled by a restless, unstoppable creativity—at times brilliant, at others terribly clumsy, but always able to churn out one idea after another—actually be running out of resources? Like most questions concerning the Welshman, this one too will prove very hard to answer.

Two years of silence are broken, at the start of 2012, by a statement—a rare occurrence for someone as sparing with words as Jenkinson—announcing the arrival of the eleventh chapter in the Squarepusher saga, a full five years after his last "electronic" record: "After the last few releases, which were almost acoustic in nature, I wanted to dedicate myself again to something entirely electronic for this new album. Something very melodic, but also very aggressive."

A genuine preview of what Jenkinson would actually deliver on the new album, titled Ufabulum. Launched with a massive marketing campaign, Ufabulum is in fact a sugary, sticky slab of harsh-pop, built from explosive rhythmic skeletons and catchy, ear-friendly melodies, which a less attentive ear might mistake for a souped-up version of Hello Everything, with which it actually shares very little (the intimate melodicism of the latter has nothing in common with the rhythmic extroversion of the former).

The album, viewed from a strictly artistic/evolutionary standpoint, could sound like Squarepusher's epitaph, given the definitive abandonment of any attempt at progress, at innovating his sound, or even at personalizing it—for an artist who had built his entire career on exactly those elements—in favour of adapting to the commercial trends of the moment, which at the time were dominated all too heavily by figures such as, say, Skrillex. If the record is instead viewed from a purely musical perspective, the picture changes considerably, thanks to the incredible ability of its brazen sound to win over and satisfy the listener. These qualities come through at their best in the techno foundation submerged beneath melodic layers on opener "4001", in the acid music-box tones over tilted μ-Ziq-style beats of "Unreal Square", in "Dark Steering"—the lead single in which Jenkinson aligns himself with Skrillex's sound only to make a mockery of it—and in the electro-pop closer "Estatic Shock": all tracks with the potential to sell plenty and light up the dancefloors of the best clubs.

There are also nods to the nostalgic, crystalline pop of Daft Punk in the synth expanses of "Stadium Ice" and, above all, "Endless Wizard", a few returns to drum 'n' bass territory courtesy of "The Metallurgist" and "303 Scopem Hard", echoing Luke Vibert and Lfo respectively, and an outlier, the rollicking "Drax 2", a scant ten minutes of deep-house over breakbeat frames that isn't far removed from that Go Plastic which represents the high point of Jenkinson the electronics obsessive.

Once again distant from any previous exploration bearing the Squarepusher name, Ufabulum is yet another detour, like the many others there have been throughout his career, though less radical than those of the past. For this reason, it remains cryptic in its inability to answer the question raised above, and instead rather good at sparking two opposing schools of thought: a mature musician or a burnt-out one? An adaptation of his own sound to current trends, or a loss of identity? The ability to ride the wave like the best of pop stars, or a sell-out to the music industry? Whatever the answer to these questions may be, it certainly isn't suggested by the record itself, which nonetheless has the merit of delivering a scant hour of fresh, engaging music—from which one can comfortably strip away the pointless bonus Enstrobia EP—even if it's clearly inferior to the Welshman's best work and not without one too many winks toward an at-all-costs easy, almost predictable sound.

The album is followed by a lengthy tour that also takes in Italy as part of Meet In Town, with dates seeing Jenkinson perform behind huge screens while wearing a mask. The screens are perhaps the real visual punch, thanks to the light shows, flashes and pixel effects projected onto them. What falls short, however, is the musical side: these are not, as announced, actual concerts, but rather full-on dj-sets, in which the musician does little more than wearily stitch together unreleased pre-recorded sections and excerpts from Ufabulum. Also missing are the treated-bass interventions that had previously been a true trademark of his live shows. As a token of appreciation to attendees, the KCRW Sessions EP is offered, containing five reworkings of tracks from Ufabulum, which add nothing to and take nothing away from the meaning of the work.

More hyped than ever by the cybertech turn and now increasingly interested in riding the frontier of technology, a year later Jenkinson offers up his music as a willing guinea pig for a project run by a pool of Japanese robotics researchers. The goal, ambitious on paper but in truth outdated from the very start, is to create a perfect system that fully replicates a human band: thus Z-Machines is born, a trio of aesthetically stunning robots set on reproducing the entire instrumentation of a guitar-bass-drums trio with electronic surrogates. Futuristic in theory and decidedly over the top—just as the visual design of Ufabulum had been—the project proves far less innovative in practice: from a technological standpoint, the three robots essentially just retread experiments long superseded by the application of computing to music, managing to astonish and offer a dose of novelty (though certainly not innovation) only through the kinetic integration of gesture. We hadn't yet seen a robot that, computer-controlled, physically plays an instrument, but robots capable of far more complex feats, perhaps even with a shred of artificial intelligence, have been around for a while. Squarepusher's musical contribution is essentially a more organic reworking of the sounds from the previous album, with a fearsome breakcore-style push that is, however (surprisingly, given the character in question), kept on a tight leash. The Music For Robots EP documents the entire operation across five tracks and sums up its value well: a short, pleasant collection of electronica better suited to the living room than the dancefloor, for which there was certainly no need to invoke such a grandiose concept.

After a career spent oscillating between flashes of innovative genius and plunges into deep disarray, under the banner of a multipolar eclecticism that at times translated into extraordinary versatility, and at others into exuberant incoherence, Jenkinson seems to have finally settled on a continuation of his activity split between a turn towards an increasingly commercial sound and the diversion of the occasional side project: what's certain is that, for obvious reasons, any future last hurrah would be anything but shocking.

The 2015 release is titled Damogen Furies, and has the merit of reviving an approach to electronic music that goes straight for the jugular, without the fusion-y or even prog-adjacent fussiness that had weighed down or derailed some of Tom Jenkinson's recent moves. This time the artist known as Squarepusher brings plenty of venom, assembles devastating, stinging sounds, and pours them into a record built to last.

In some tracks the fury is uncontainable (opener "Stor Eiglass" alone is breathtaking, even though it's basically a pop trinket, albeit one assembled in a highly personal way—try spotting the Cure's "Just Like Heaven" hiding inside it...), in others brooding ambient landscapes loom, regularly disrupted by jittery intrusions ("Baltang Ort"), anxious flickers ("Rayc Fire 2"), or beds of oblique pop over which ever-well-handled synths are laid ("Baltang Arg").

"Damogen Furies" is a work steeped in obsessions, the unsettling soundtrack to a nightmare in which someone is chasing us with mysterious intentions, though we can't rule out with any certainty that it's all purely a product of our imagination, filtered through some distorted perception of reality.

Squarepusher's new step is a challenging one; perhaps his intent today is no longer necessarily to posit hypothetical, avant-garde future scenarios, but rather to produce a reliable snapshot of the current state of the art of a certain strand of contemporary electronic music, all while maintaining an appropriate underlying coherence.

The following album, Be Up A Hello, by contrast, has no interest in the contemporary; it comes out (following the live album Elektrac, again released under the Shobaleader One name) at the start of 2020. The record takes shape from two rather traumatic personal experiences for Jenkinson—breaking his wrist and losing his close friend Chris Marshall (a companion from his earliest electronic music days)—which shift the album's centre of gravity towards a heartfelt stylistic return to his roots (using exclusively analogue machines from the mid-nineties), partly as a tribute to Marshall's memory.

After an opener with broad melodic sweep ("Oberlove"), the album moves into more markedly drill'n'bass territory, some of it rather ferocious ("Nervelevers", "Terminal Slam", "Speedcrank"), which will delight longtime fans and express the (at times quite painful) need to return to an era—the post-rave scene of the mid-nineties, precisely—when everything felt fresh and gleaming. A forceful, neurotic complexity of detail remains throughout, every bit as jaw-dropping as similar forays into that territory by other deities of the Warp pantheon, such as Aphex Twin himself or Autechre, and it snarls on, indifferent to the end-of-decade conceptronica aesthetic.

An album where Squarepusher does Squarepusher, caught between new doubts and old certainties, able to shrug off expectations about his relevance today while preserving the force that still makes him unpredictable.

The follow-up, Dostrotime from 2024, moves along the same lines, offering an electronic vocabulary built between drill'n'bass schizophrenia and hyper-detailed structures. The opening of "Dostrotime", entrusted to the first of three acoustic chapters titled "Arkteon", seems to deny that tendency, but it's enough to reach the relentless crescendo of "Enbounce" to rediscover the mastery of his most explosive rhythmic/melodic weaves, which shape the record's development up to "Duneray". From here on, Jenkinson veers toward atmospheric solutions driven by fluid bass lines ("Kronmec") or measured breakbeats that suddenly flare up ("Akkranen"), marking a necessary truce that nonetheless defines the least gripping section of the work.

The pace ramps up dizzyingly again with "Stromcor" and the convulsive "Domelash" - among the best tracks on offer - before settling definitively into a double meditative drift that feels like a superfluous extension. Trimmed of a few dead passages, "Dostrotime" would certainly rank among Squarepusher's best productions, with Jenkinson once again skilled at reviving the glory of a singular style, though at times overly self-indulgent.

Over the course of his career, he has also ventured into a few side projects, including Stereotype, consisting of a single, self-titled EP from 1994, remastered and brought back to light by Warp Records in 2025: a triumph of apocalyptic acidcore, but also of unexpected emotions and suspended harmonies.

The sixteen minutes of "Whooshki" open the record, and the impact is immediate: a synth line repeats an ambient techno mantra wrapped in hypervelocity distortion. The magnetism lies not in sheer power, but in a melodic streak with a clear Idm lineage that, woven into a rhythmic bed worthy of a steel mill, sparks a glorious short-circuit for both the ravenous dancefloor and the contemplative listener.

It's the contrast between the bionic force of the beat and the light of the harmonic weaves that creates the perfect friction. Next comes "1994", which pushes hammering, claustrophobic tension, carving out ten atonal minutes of industrial-club fury closer to the abrasive aesthetic of Woody McBride than to the nu-jazz textures of "Feed Me Weird Things". "O'Brien" opens up sci-fi, lysergic scenarios over blazing breakbeats, as if Global Communication had gotten lost at a rave on amphetamines. From here it slides from a supersonic-mode Aphex Twin to the lo-fi fractures of early Idm, in a constant interplay of friction and trance. In "Stereotype" the distortions of the rhythm section dominate, along with modulated synths and long chords, as thin as digital smoke, the latter sublimated in "Greenwidth", a hypnotic journey for interstellar explorers.

Kammerkonzert (2026) finds Thomas Jenkinson grappling with a new twist on his language: cerebral jazz fusion, chamber music and idm-breakcore heritage intertwine in an imaginary concert of programmed strings and frantic odd time signatures. Rather than focusing on synthesizers, the record leans on harmony, intonation and constant modal shifts, moving through fourteen restless themes that shun loops, repetition and any notion of immediacy. The result doesn't stray far from the historic core of works like "Feed Me Weird Things", but grafts it onto a classical ensemble that heightens its sense of estrangement, to an almost uncanny-valley effect. Fascinating as a concept, less so as a listen, it remains an extreme, stubborn work, often more cerebral than magnetic, whose ambition is above all what deserves credit.

Contributions by Claudio Lancia ("Damogen Furies"), Paolo Ciro ("Be Up A Hello"), Peppe Trotta ("Dostrotime"), Alessandro Giustiniano ("Stereotype", "Kammerkonzert")

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