Quite a few years ago, I was talking to Tom Jenkinson about his considerable popularity in Japan, and he remarked that (I’m paraphrasing here), he especially enjoyed playing on the other side of the world because the further you get from the origins of musical styles geographically and temporally, the less categories matter to people and the more they’re able to engage with the music on its own merits. This came back to me more recently when I heard Jenkinson being interviewed by Sherelle on the radio, which brought home how much water has flowed under the bridge in the decades since Squarepusher – along with compadres like Aphex Twin and Luke Vibert – produced music that existed parallel to, but entirely separate from, jungle and drum & bass scene. The latter was the definition of a closed shop, a small core of dubplate-swapping tastemakers guarding its identity, and it wasn’t interested in nerdy interlopers adding acid lines, comedy samples and jazz fusion solos into its formulas.
Sherelle, of course, is a figurehead for the way that, now, in the flux of the streaming era, sound really does come before genre delineation. She is a meticulous historian of jungle, footwork and various hard dance styles, paying special attention to their expression of Black musical lineages – but in her actual DJ sets there is no reverence for the divisions between those styles or between eras, and priority is always given to what fits the dynamic of the set and what has the most impact in the here and now. So the fact that she can find common cause with the music of Squarepusher, Aphex and especially Vibert (who she loves wholeheartedly – she once called him “Lord Vibert” in an interview) is a reminder that they are more sonically compatible with their inspirations than anyone was willing to admit at the time.
This record actually comes from a time before Jenkinson was using jungle breakbeats, in fact from before he was Squarepusher. But it does serve to show that for all that obsessive taxonomists might want to peel him and the whole Warp/Rephlex industrial complex away from more authentic and hardcore styles, it was all barely one degree of separation away, and Jenkinson from the very start had both feet squarely in the rave. It was originally self-released in 1994 – with the help of Chelmsford friend Hardy Finn who would go on to co-found the Spymania label that launched him as Squarepusher the following year – and consisted of six long tracks crammed on to a single EP release with the sound quality compromise that entails, so it’s good to have it at last remastered and for vinyl lovers spread across two discs so it sounds as it should.
Those tracks really are long. The shortest is nearly five minutes, the opener ‘Whooshki’ almost seventeen. It can take a bit of getting used to in the age of dance tunes structured for the quick cut CDJ era, but it was par for the course in 1994, when techno and trance still weren’t fully speciated, and epics the order of the day. This and the following track ‘1994’ are essentially techno, absolutely ripping along at 150bpm and a jungle tempo 170bpm respectively, although again back then that wasn’t exceptional by the standards of the big techno clubs or raves where you could expect Jeff Mills, Joey Beltram, Sven Väth and co. to pound you into the ground at 150 as standard, and the likes of Lenny Dee, DJ Producer on the same bills pushing to gabber tempo.
‘Whooshki’ is the most Squarepusher-y track here, mainly down to the gorgeous chord sequence and evidence of a natural gift for melody in an acid line that writhes through crashing 909 drums that owe a fair bit to what Richie Hawtin at his most LSD-drenched and strobe-crazed had been doing in the couple of years previously. It’s proper cathedrals-of-sound stuff and once you reconfigure your attention span enough to deal with the fact it takes almost three minutes just for the kickdrum to come in, it’s glorious to experience even if you aren’t two microdots and a gram of base to the good in a seething pit of limbs. ‘1994’ has hints of the type of German trance inspired by the opening up of Eastern Bloc military amphetamine factories and a hefty dose of Richard D. James in Caustic Window mode – but it carves own its own space by virtue of sounding particularly infernal, every sound coming over like a screech of claws on iron or a sulphurous belch.
The remaining tracks are all even more beholden to Aphex Twin – hilarious in retrospect given how much he in turn would lift from Jenkinson very soon after as they became friends and entered into an arms race of hectic breakbeat editing. The sense of tribute even appears to be fairly overtly signalled in the frenzy of distorted, flanged cymbals and balloon-rubbing acid that is ‘Greenwidth’ – any self-respecting (or indeed self-hating) braindancing dork would read that as a portmanteau of ‘Green Calx’ and ‘Pulsewidth’ from Aphex’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92. Even so, though, they’re incredibly varied, achieve a fundamental tactile weirdness of sound that can’t just come from pastiche, have structures that are rather more theatrical than Aphex’s and generally feel like they’re straining at the boundaries of even this rowdy, trippy form. The closer ‘O’Brien (Darness)’ is a massive standout; sonically still very Aphex but the chopped-up broken beats pointing again to what would become the Squarepusher signature sound, and everything maxed-out in intensity as if he needs every microsecond of noise to grab you by the throat.
The EP didn’t sell well at the time – there were, after all, a lot of people doing things that sounded a bit like Aphex Twin and even with these energy levels it was hard to stand out – causing a period of reflection from which Jenkinson bounced back as Squarepusher and never looked back. But with the distance of time and the benefit of that crunchy remaster, it’s possible to hear just how much furious desire to wreck heads was present from the start, and how rooted in the hardcore raving of nights like Lost and Final Frontier, his practice was from the very start. That hardcore energy is unmistakeable, transcends his immediate influences, and explains why his later work has a sound that reverberates now not only with experimental music nerds but with those holding the incandescent torch from neo rave DJs like Sherelle to the Japanese rhythm game scene of artists like Camellia which creates some of the most crazed music on the planet today. Plus, influence and comparison completely aside, a gutsy enough DJ could still cause havoc with any of these tracks.
