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Feed Us Weird Things: Artists On Their Favourite Squarepusher Music
Patrick Clarke , June 17th, 2021 10:10

To mark the new reissue of Squarepusher's debut album 'Feed Me Weird Things', the likes of Loraine James, John Frusciante and Danalogue pick their favourite albums and tracks by the game-changing producer

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Kavus Torabi on ‘Fat Controller ‘(G7000 Mix)’ from Vic Acid (1997)

I already really loved Squarepusher, but the whole EP really, really blew my mind. I’d heard Feed Me Weird Things which I really liked, but when I heard Vic Acid it was ‘Here we go, now we’re really getting somewhere.' I remember thinking ‘This is the most exciting music that’s being made anywhere.' He’s clearly someone who spends a great deal of time programming, he’s a real auteur. Just the way that the rhythms and the beats have been subdivided and in such a musical way. That’s when I realised that as much as I love Aphex Twin, his approach was different. With Tom Jenkinson it was done in this incredibly musical way.

A little switch flicked on in my mind when I realised that what Jenkinson was doing was the same thing as the Tatsuya Yoshida with Ruins. This was the real avant-prog of nowadays! What I loved so much about that track is that in the middle it goes into this really glorious, uplifting breakbeat section, this really happy bit, it builds up and builds up then drops back into the absurd ‘verse’ of the original. At the time the only thing I’d heard like it was full-on extreme avant-prog stuff. I just made this connection that art is all the same thing. Just because he’s programming it makes no difference, it’s coming from the same kind of mind. And of course, as it then emerges, he’s this incredible fusion bass player, he hadn’t exactly hidden that. He came out, and then a couple of years later he put out Music Is A Rotted One Note, and it’s like ‘He is from that world then.'

The first time I saw him DJ was in a funny little venue called The Soundshaft which is round the back of Heaven on Charing Cross Road. There used to be a night in the 90s called Refresh, it was a Tuesday night, £2 to get in. Me and my mates were all on the dole so it was perfect. One night Tom Jenkinson was DJing there, and in the booth he was putting on this totally mad music, then at one point he got his bass out in the DJ booth and started jamming along a load of fusion over what he was playing. I was like ‘Woah, this guy is totally the real deal, no fucking about!’ If I didn’t know already what a brilliant musician he was, I certainly found out that night.