Do you know Squarepusher is Tom Jenkinson’s 6th album and came out in 2002 on his longtime home, Warp Records, following Go Plastic which I’ve covered at length in another video – link in the description below if you want to check that out. The album came with a bonus disc, Alive in Japan, which contains a few tracks from this record, as well as some from Go Plastic performed live in Tokyo. At just 7 tracks and 37 minutes, it’s Squarepusher’s shortest LP, and doesn’t count as a double album since the second disc is just live versions of previously released material.
Do you know Squarepusher is probably the first album in his discography that didn’t feel like a true step forward, in the evolution and development of his sound. But given his groundbreaking run of releases from the mid 90s to early 00s, we can forgive one small misstep. For starters, it’s quite scant on material – just 37 minutes and 7 tracks – and 10 minutes of that is given over to Mutilation Colony, an experimental ambient piece, which I’ll talk more about in a minute.
There’s also a shorter ambient interlude which essentially serves as the intro to Mutilation Colony, and the final track is a cover of Joy Division’s Love Will tear us apart- yes, that Joy Division. That leaves just four remaining tracks which to be honest would’ve worked much better as a four track EP.
There’s also the live disc, which to be honest I’ve probably listened to a handful of times. I’ve never really understood the appeal of live albums – unless the performance is radically different to the recorded version, or it’s a recording of a gig you were actually present at. Why would I want to listen to basically the same tracks at lower quality with crowd noise in the background?
But let’s get into it, as there are four solid tracks here and although I said Do you Know Squarepusher is not a true step forward, some of these move in a different direction than where he’d gone before.
For someone who comes across as a deeply sincere and thoughtful artist in most interviews I’ve read, the proclamation of himself as ‘the daddy’ always comes off a little jarring. What began as seemingly ironic – the deafening roar of I’m the fucking daddy on Come on My Selector to the blink and miss you it ‘Squarepusher’s the fucking daddy on My Fucking Sound – seems to have become an un-self-conscious act of self-mythology at this point. As the title track opens with a voice asking ‘who d’you think’s the daddy then?’ The answer of course is Squarepusher, who “makes all the different styles of drum’n’bass”.
Like on My Red Hot Car, maybe he was leaning into the machismo of UK Garage, a style from which he incorporates many elements as well as parodying. This track, Do You Know Squarepusher is a glitchy, spacey beat workout which, while heavily indebted to UKG could almost be classed as future garage if it wasn’t 10 years too early. Decent enough and sounds very early 00s with the glitchy crunchy treatment of the beats and spacey synth – almost a hint of Timbaland R’n’B about it?
F-train is a less fully realised precursor to 50 Cycles, which appears on his next album, Ultravisitor. Jenkinson’s voice seemingly narrates snatches of a dystopian sci-fi essay – phrases such as “axis discrepancy indicates hexagons beyond control anomaly” emerge in his pitched-down estuary grumble, over ricocheting beats and glitches that rebound almost painfully across the soundstage. The austere sci-fi construction feels like a nod to Autechre, though it’s a style they pull off much more effectively.
Kill Robok is also Autechrey, in its cold and metallic sound design and the way the rhythm writhes unpredictably and seems to emerge from the tangle of clangs and bloops as a chaotic butterfly effect. From this vantage point, I’d call it as the strongest track on the album; it’s the most successful experiment Jenkinson pulls off here and unlike anything he’s done before, or since really.
If you’d asked me back in the day for my top track, then it would’ve easily been Anstromm-feck 4, which is the closest in sound to Go Plastic, but eschews the experimental jazz-informed freestyling of that album for a more straight up verse/chorus structure. The result is kind of chiptune drum’n’bass but amped up to about 200bpm hyper as fuck.
Mutilation Colony is a ten minute piece of experimental sound-design, I’d guess you’d call it. It feels too linear to really be considered ambient, not to mention the mood is unsettling and the tonality abrasive. Again, it’s not really like anything he’d done before (or since for that matter), although you could say the seeds were sown in Metteng Escuske, the minute long interlude on Go Plastic which contains some similar textures. I can see how Mutilation Colony would work accompanied by some visuals, as it feels very much like a narrative, albeit in the same vein as the oblique sci-fi of F-train. It was never a track I really played much back in the day and even listening to it a few times in preparation for making this video, it just doesn’t click with me. Thankfully it doesn’t seem to be an avenue of exploration that interested Tom too much as he’s never really returned to this kind of sound since.
The Joy Division cover is much more faithful to the original than you might expect a Squarepusher cover to be; he certainly doesn’t transform it into a psychotic drill’n’bass rave-up. Love Will tear us Apart is such an iconic track, it’s a brave choice for a cover and Jenkinson is smart enough not to think he can elevate it. But then neither does he really make it his own. Was it just a way of calling out some more of his influences, or did he just want to prove to himself – or the world – that he can do straight up guitar music? I don’t know. It closes the album out with some much needed human warmth, after the sterile Mutilation Colony but it’s so incongruous, it just feels odd.
As a whole, Do You Know Squarepusher lacks the consistency and depth of material to match up to any of his prior releases. And there’s a real feeling that there was no overarching vision for the album, given it contains tongue-in-cheek deconstructions of UK Garage, the soundtrack to an alien apocalypse and a cover of a classic post-punk anthem. Maybe that’s what he was getting at by calling the record, Do You Know Squarepusher… no, maybe we don’t truly know him.
Obviously, given this is Squarepusher we’re talking about, the good stuff is really good, if you dig experimental electronic music. And you’re never gonna have a bad time if you stick Anstromm Feck-4 on…unless you’re trying to get to sleep.
But for such a forward thinking and visionary artist, it feels cobbled together. An awkward sideways step, between two of his greatest works, Go Plastic and Ultravisitor.
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