Feed me weird things

Squarepusher mutters softly but carries a big shtick

U.K. producer Tom “Squarepusher” Jenkinson has blown minds and eardrums, harnessing sheer sonic audacity across a decade of humorously harrowing and seriously comical releases. Basking in the radiation tan of his computer screen, Jenkinson blurts beats and births subgenres while mocking micro-genres — chuckling the whole way to becoming arguably the foremost comic mind in contemporary electronic music.

Squarepusher’s earliest recordings for the tiny Spymania label, and the bangin’ acid trax Jenkinson recorded as Chaos A.D., reveal a youth enamored of hardcore rave’s over-the-fookin’-top E rush. But rather than reflect the luv’d-up vibe of the U.K.’s outdoor fests, Squarepusher infused an absurdly sinister undercurrent to the fleet renegade snares, demonic acid basslines and 170-bpm punch-press kick drums.

Amid such tangentially rave-friendly tracks as “Generation Shit,” Jenkinson muttered ominous musing such as, “snare-drum roll, snare-drum roll, that’s really fucking exciting, bye!” and “have you ever thought about the long-term consequences of the drugs you’re taking, you stupid fucking wankers?” Meanwhile, Squarepusher was probably gobbling his share of hallucinogens, if his infatuation with acid-referencing songs are any indication.

Those fledgling efforts hinted at Squarepusher’s maverick potential, which magnificently bloomed on 1996’s Feed Me Weird Things and 1997’s Hard Normal Daddy. The latter album particularly tickled funny bones, as Squarepusher’s rhythms are so micromanaged, frenetic and intricate, the mind somersaults with joy trying to follow their loony drill-and-bass defining contours.

Along with its even more hyper 1998 twin Big Loada, Daddy provokes more laffs per minute than most comedy club headliners muster. The rib-ticklingly riotous Jaco Pastorius-on-speed basslines, growling 303 acid filigrees and 180-bpm pretzel logic beats will have you crying with glee, as if you’d just figured out the meaning of infinity after your fifth bong hit.

Like Woody Allen, though, Squarepusher peaked comedically with his early work. For a while, things in ‘Pusherland became very serious, indeed. The 1998 idiosyncratic Miles Davis homage, Music Is Rotted One Note, signaled a compositional drift to less sequencing. Around this time, Jenkinson started hobnobbing with some of Britain’s top improv players, and collaborated with Welsh eccentric Richard Thomas for a brilliant out-jazz EP. Humor seeped out, albeit less rambunctiously than before. But then came the 21st-century trilogy.

Whereas most electronic musicians keep their inner spaz locked in the attic, Squarepusher gives his free rein, armed with an education in elite jazz-fusioneering. This has allowed Squarepusher the ability to pinpoint a genre’s signatures, identifying a trend he then desecrates as he re-creates. With his pinnacle, Go Plastic, ‘Pusher did just that to the gruff-meets-gloss two-step genre on “My Red Hot Car,” perhaps Squarepusher’s best-known track. Its genius lies in how Jenkinson both emulates and deflates two-step’s brazen materialism and alpha-male asshole-osity, and, in the process, still creates a classic.

Go Plastic represented the zenith of Squarepusher’s complexity-for-complexity’s ache approach. His next release, Do You Know Squarepusher, offered diminishing returns of that overwrought experience. But it did include a deadly earnest cover of Joy Division’s chestnut, “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” Which begged the question some have been asking since the mid-’90s: Is Squarepusher joking? Answer: Yes — and no.

Lately, Jenkinson’s been prone to pontificating about his music with academic jargon that gets abstract electronic aficionados tumescent. And from someone so flippant and/or evasive to date, that’s hilarious, too. Any sincerity is hilarious. From the quasi-Windham Hill guitar noodling of “Every Day I Love” to the lease-breaking cacophony of “Steinbolt,” Squarepusher’s latest bastardpiece, Ultravisitor, bestows 80 minutes of brow-furrowing career-retrospection and technique upgrading, conjuring enough madcap laughs and psycho-delic fractures to return Pink Floyd’s original piper at the gates of dawn Syd Barrett to sanity.

With each album, Squarepusher the vaudevillain winks and tips his foppish hat before turning on his heels to release another 360-degree genre-redefining jest.

music@creativeloafing.com