| Description: | "I'm just trying to shut myself out of the mediocrity that surrounds us all. You have to when a bit of plastic's all that represents you in the world."
If it's a unifying agenda you're after, the elusive key to unlocking Squarepusher's music, then that quote's possibly the one. Or as close as you're ever going to get to music that has defiantly resisted categorisation right from the off. It's certainly a lot more revealing of the new Squarepusher album "Music is Rotted One Note" than any comparisons, name checking, or 'my influences are...' flannel.
25 year old Tom Jenkinson has been spiking inertia ever since his debut releases on the Spymania label back in '95. The tracks, re-released last year by Warp as the 'Burning'n Tree' album, typify Tom's approach to his music. Complex, fluid, restlessly inventive, constantly striving to strike the balance between energy and innovation and fuelled by the desire to achieve nothing less than the best.
Then there's the Squarepusher live performances. Acclaimed gigs at Glastonbury, Mount Fuji Rock festival in Japan, and Belgium's Ten Days of Techno, where Tom would improvise live bass around the structures he was creating with his boxes and tapes. Chaotic affairs they may have often been but at the same time shot through with a purposiveness absent in most lacklustre electronic acts claiming to have gone 'live'. His legendary DJ sets known to include furious drum'n'bass, hardcore, tequila, even the work of the brothers Bros (I Owe You Nothing?) have shaken dancefloors to an incendiary state helped along by Tom's unique, somewhat confrontational, style of toasting. All are examples of rallying against the apathy and mediocrity. |
