Big Loada was one of the first releases by Squarepusher that I got my hands on when I was around 17/18, around the same time I got Go Plastic and Hard Normal Daddy on CD. And I’ll say upfront it’s one of my favourite releases by him and one of my favourite releases of all time – absolutely killer.
Big Loada was released on Warp Records which at this point was the label releasing the vast majority of Squarepusher’s music, in the UK at least. It came hot on the heels of the Hard Normal Daddy album, and you can watch my video on that in the description below. In the US, the release of Big Loada included 3 additional tracks taken from another release, the Port Rhombus EP, which I’ll cover briefly. But it’s the UK release which is the version I’m most familiar with, which contained just 7 tracks. And one of those is just a 40 second outro so really it’s 6 tracks, lasting just under half an hour.
But in that half an hour, Squarepusher manages to redefine his sound and set a new benchmark for the possibilities of the experimental breakbeat sound – let’s not call it drill’n’bass – that he was working within. It’s an outstanding slab of tunage, with no fat on it whatsoever, just a pure condensed hit of bold, exciting, forward-thinking, adventurous and just outrageously fun music. So in my view, an absolutely stellar release, a classic EP that I rate as highly as any of his albums.
Hard Normal Daddy was an impressively successful fusion of Squarepusher’s jazz influences, with the ravier, breakbeat and acid sound (defined largely by the Roland 303 bass synthesiser). Big Loada leans much more into the rave/breakbeat side of things but features, if anything just as much bass guitar, and in ways where the instrument becomes an integral part of Squarepusher’s sound and he’s using it innovative ways – literally serving as the bass in his warped take on drum’n’bass.
I tend to view Big Loada in a similar way to the Richard D James album – the iconic release from Aphex Twin that came out the year before. Not so much in the way they sound, as the RDJ album is much more organic and odd, but just where they sit in each artist’s discography. Both releases are around the half hour mark and each offers a concentrated dose of wizardry from each respective artist at the peak of their powers.
So let’s get into the details and what better place to start, as the EP does, than with the track Journey to Reedham (7AM Mix), one of Squarepusher’s best known and most-loved tracks. Pretty much every time I’ve seen Squarepusher live, he’s ended on this track making its very much his calling card. I’ve always imagined it to be the soundtrack to a journey back from an all night rave (given it’s called the 7am mix). Growing up in Essex, outside London, going to raves in the countryside and suburbia around London was surely something Tom Jenkinson would have done in his youth. Although Reedham is actually a village in Norfolk, much further out into the countryside, so whether there was once a rave somewhere out there in the fields, I don’t know. I’m sure someone out there can shed light on the story there.
It opens with an 8-bit melody; the kind of sounds that were used in computer and arcade games at the time, which is strongly in keeping with the 8-bit aesthetics of the sleeve, and gives the track its slightly e’d up, wired vibe. This is tempered by just this lovely melody – no other word for it – which has a drone-like quality to it, or almost like an electric guitar tone that’s being held and sustained. It’s uplifting, boundlessly optimistic but not in any way cheesy. As a very quick generalisation, I’d say most of my favourite electronic music is more on the melancholy side, but this is a bit of an outlier for being just unapologetically uplifting and positive sounding.
The beats are very distinctive too, it’s as if the drum break is being squeezed and fed through a narrow tube so we get this squeaking effect, like the beat is literally being compressed. Then there’s a bass drum or whatever it is at the bottom of the mix, which sounds like a huge barrel with a ball in it being rolled around (in a good way). I lack the technical knowledge to properly describe what’s going on here, but the overall percussive rhythm of Journey to Reedham is very distinctive and in a way unique. Absolutely awesome track, one of his best and one of my favourites of any artist.
Moving to another iconic Squarepusher track, which is 4th on the disc – Come on my Selector. This is a harder and more abrasive track but it’s also pure unadulterated fun – you get the sense Squarepusher had a lot of fun making this, just pushing breakbeats as far as they’d go and seeing how fast he could play his bass alongside. Opening with the iconic ‘Think’ break, sampled from Think About it by the soul artist Lyn Collins; this has been sampled in countless tracks over the years, from hip-hop to rave, house, jungle, etc and you’d recognise it as soon as you hear it. Here it’s pitched up a lot faster than usual, and is just the gateway to the insanity that unfolds over the course of 3.5 minutes. The bass guitar sounds fairly untreated here, and it gives this lovely organic throbbing warmth to the undercarriage, so the track really moves with this funky, jazzy, unpredictable energy.
Squarepusher has said in an interview that the reference to him being ‘the daddy’, which heralds Come on My Selector’s blistering conclusion, was in there before Aphex Twin came out with Come to Daddy. Which means it’s just coincidence that Squarepusher and Aphex both had tracks around this time that reference them being ‘the daddy’. Obviously on Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy, this is spoken by the demonic ghoul that narrates the track. On Come of my Selector, we get the immortal sample at 2:30, presumably it’s Jenkinson himself exclaiming, “I’m the fucking daddy!”, before unleashing the apocalyptic climax, and in that moment it’s hard to disagree.
Next I want to talk about another of my all time favourite Squarepusher tracks, Massif (Stay Strong). I don’t recall ever seeing him play this live, though I never got to see him in the 90s so maybe he used to play it back in the day, either way, I feel like it gets under-rated. Like Journey to Reedham, it has this beautiful sunny, joyful energy, and he employs the bass guitar in such an unusual and original way, essentially as the melodic lead with all this crazy explosive soloing but the bass is run through some kind of effect to give it this digital 8-bit feel, over high tempo bombastic breakbeats. Another absolute pearler.
Track 2 on the disc is Full Rinse, which has more of a straight-up drum’n’bass/jungle sound although again the breaks sound like they’re being pushed to the limit, like the drum sounds themselves are being tightly squeezed. This is an effect that crops up again and again through Squarepusher’s music. The sleeve credits an MC Twin Tub, who supplies ragga-style MC vocals. This was in fact a questionable character who once lived next door to Tom Jenkinson in North London and would apparently invite himself round, sometimes to show off his collection of knives; and whose true identity has been lost to the mists of time.
Since I’ve mentioned most of the tracks already, I might as well cover all of them. The Body Builder is another dense breakbeat-driven number, sitting in the same vein as The Fat Controller off Hard Normal Daddy. The melodic component consists of this almost atonal sort of droning, which sounds like the effect of various knobs on a filter being tweaked to modify the output. We get bubbling 303 bass effects and all this hyper feedback and wails of distortion and again what sounds like drum hits being squashed and squeezed – altogether a very visceral piece.
The final proper track (aside from Jacque mal chance which is just 40 seconds) is Tequila Fish, which is probably the most ‘chill’ track on the record, although it still has plenty of hectic portions. It alternates between a half tempo beat, with this heavy, groovy bassline, interspersed with pitched up breaks that flip into jungle tempo and a sampled snippet of someone saying ‘DJ’. There’s a key change, or something like that, part way through with the introduction of a similar melody to one from Journey to Reedham, that plays out in the same soaring, kind of psychedelic, droning fashion. This melody is more circumspect but still super lush – it doesn’t actually last for long and my brain is always expecting it to be reintroduced, but Tom closes things out with the return of the same groovy head-nodding bassline.
I’ll mention Port Rhombus as well; it wasn’t included on the original UK release, so I’ve never considered it part of Big Loada, but it’s such an excellent track, it’s worth talking about. Much more soothing melodically speaking than the rest of the EP, a spare melody played on electric piano is overlaid with fairly unadorned acoustic guitar, which gives it a much softer and dreamier character than the harsh urban and industrial sound palette of the rest of the record. Then Tom brings in the amen break again but it’s so micro-chopped, the drum rolls just spill forth in this kind of endless cascade, like torrential rain falling on a tin roof, it just pelts down but in a way that becomes soothing, and it bleeds into the melodic energy of the track. A juxtaposition of lush melodies and abrasive percussion and the result is really gorgeous. As I never listened to this track in the context of a full release, it sits in a weird part of my mind as one that I’d just play now and then, free of any context. And the piece itself inhabits this secluded kind of dreamworld – quite distinct from most of the rest of Jenkinson’s music.
Squarepusher is that rare thing of an artist who’s both prolific and consistent and there are other points in his discography that match this in terms of quality. But it’s fair to say this period around 1997 he was at – one of – the peaks of his powers. He put out a lot of music in a short space of time, and practically all of it is exceptional. It’s experimental, deeply original and creative but also incredibly fun and joyful.
Much of his later work would become more inward looking and cerebral and you might say self-indulgent and I don’t have anything against that – but this era just sounds like he’s discovering new techniques and ideas constantly and having a brilliant time sharing the results with the world. And it was a time when electronic music in general was going through a huge explosion, driven by changes in technology and the complete splintering of genres, to the point where it seemed anything was possible.
Big Loada is like lightning in a bottle from that time, and I know is deeply cherished by many fans. If you’re watching this having not heard it before then I can imagine it would sound, not dated as such but a product of its time. But I can only strongly recommend you check it out – if you’re watching at this point, you surely have more than a passing interest in this kind of music. I don’t rate records, but if I did this would be 5 stars – stone cold classic.
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