Artist: Squarepusher
Album: Ultravisitor 20th Anniversary Edition
Reviewer: Rem Jensen
Toxic, Bush’s second term, Facebook; 2004 brought a selection of events and moments that shaped and sneak-peeked the post-Y2K world as it was developing. There was a general sense of culture, with the boom of the Von Dutch multi-layered fashion archetype and the timeless classic of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie being released, countered by rising disdain for the jingoistic stubbornness of the US’s strong-handed involvement in the Iraq War, which imploded after our two attacks on Fallujah. The year brought many tug-of-war battles between citizens and their surroundings, muddying up the rocky but palatable ground that media, global politics and life was hurriedly shaping into.
However, gone from the notions of cultural relevance was the fringe, and while the indie rock of the Strokes, Interpol and Arcade Fire was taking shape and forming the new norm that still runs into today’s music landscape, the ever-creeping impact of electronic music was becoming less easy to ignore. Daft Punk, Gorillaz, Radiohead; pop was being digitized, but what was going on with the music that had already been digital?
When I think of electronic, I think of three names, predictably: Aphex Twin, Autechre and Squarepusher. These three Warped artists nailed down and progressed electronic music to a realized form, which in the evolution from Kraftwerk and Silver Apples continued a legacy of driving, inventive rhythms and textures brought on by the mangling of circuits and capacitors: Aphex with his ambient techno sound that encapsulated almost all of the ‘90s; Autechre with their cold, glitchy, cerebral generative programming; and Squarepusher, thee Tom Jenkinson, who stood out by inserting more of a human touch into his take on electronic music, much to be attributed to his imperfect, unpolished-sounding experimentational playing of his bass guitar.
This is a long way of establishing that Squarepusher’s work felt more alive and less robotic than his surrounding cast, and his 2004 record Ultravisitor threw caution to the wind and took a few swings at electro that were broad, bold, daring and super weird, but sounded less like it was cooked and stewed in the drab, concrete, dank rooms that home-recorded electronic had been establishing.
The album gets a lot of credit for me in the Squarepusher catalog as an interesting symbiosis of live and studio recordings; Tom Jenkinson’s work had always had a feel of realism to it, with those plucky bass lines, vocal samples and some tongue-in-cheek quirks that didn’t take themselves too seriously, but had plenty of room to do so. On Ultravisitor, there are our familiar conventional Warp quirks of corybantic drum and bass cuts, but splashed within and around that ‘90s sound are many strange tone shifts, with some downtempo jazzy tracks back to back with cacophonous musique concrète experimentations, not to mention the breakbeat cuts.
Our three-track run of “Telluric Piece,” “District Line II” and “Circlewave” hits all these benchmarks, and is a shining example of what the record set out to do; we go from screeching, vengeful improvisations, to coked-out, murky ragga jungle, to almost post-rocky, entrancing nu-jazz beats, all within one side of an LP.
“An Arched Pathway” I might describe as the soundtrack to a cybernetic vampire tripping down an escalator, regaining their footing, only to eventually have a repeated battle with a banana peel they keep slipping on. Jenkinson’s bass here really steals the show; fed through strange, computerized effects, struck and thwapped with the vigor of a psychopathic deviant obsessed with the banjo.
Here on Jenkinson’s seventh record, the bass work is some of his most straightforward and focused yet, like the closer “Every Day I Love,” whose ambient meditative loops might remind one of Loren Mazzacane Connors or “Andrei” with its almost classical music or modal jazz way of progressions done with so much emotional intention. These tracks stand in evident opposition against songs like the sadistic mangled beat discombobulation of “50 Cycles,” or one of my favorite cuts on the record, “Steinbolt,” which has these insanely ear-splitting resonances that collude and conspire with the malicious coupling of harrowing synth pads and some undeniably diabolical breaks.
Predictably, the drum-and-bass feel to this record is what lulls me in, but the obtuse Pollock splattering of genres keeps me listening. It’s not enough to just have the breakbeat acid worship of “Menelec” – it must be bookended by very strange, ominous synthesizer drones and sinister noise walls, mutilating the drum cuts into fragmented, twisted remnants of the track’s rhythms heard just earlier.
A fan favorite – also, a continuation of one of the tracks off of his 1999 release Budakhan Mindphone – titled “Iambic 9 Poetry” couldn’t be more different from the previously mentioned track; despite it not having the live audience cheers and room mic mixing of some of the other cuts on Ultravisitor – “I Fulcrum” and “C-Town Smash,” for example – this feels like the most alive track on the record. Between its Four Tet-like sampled drum swings, the Boards of Canada brooding synth plucks and the gigantic big band sound the last quarter of the track explodes into, it’s just really neat to have a straightforward and irrefutably upbeat track on such an ominously culminated and explosively varied album.
My heavy-handed introduction to this review may have been fueled by my fantasization with music evolving in a time of evolution, and electronic music specifically was hitting an advantageous stride in the mid-‘00s: Autechre had their own explosion of experimentation with the flashcore shrapnel of Untilted, Venetian Snares struck a chord with his modern-classical drum and bass amalgamate record Rossz Csillag Alatt Született; and the glitch music of ‘90s forefathers Oval and Pan Sonic was finally being expanded upon and formulated by now-cemented genre staples such as Fennesz, Ryoji Ikeda, Jan Jelinek and Vladislav Delay.
Then here lies our record in question. Sitting at an important time of the aughts, electronic music was reaching its general maturity while stick-to-itively kicking at air trying to obliterate anything in its sight, and Earthly living was hitting a genesis moment of technological advancements, and soon to be all too familiar seeds being sown in our tendencies to want, and have and feel, and as a result become stronger in an increasingly overstimulating, disjointed, frenetic and accelerated world.
With its bastardizations of goofy jazzy bass solos, maniacal and unrelenting drum breaks and wildly experimental electroacoustic noise tangents, you can catch all of these songs and MORE – notably on the bonus LP, which includes the Venus and Tundra EP cuts – on the 3LP 20th anniversary edition of Ultravisitor, where you can stage yourself in a time not too different from ours now, and settle into an intricate and distracting break from your everyday crusade of momentum versus time.