3. SquarepusherFeed Me Weird Things
This and the Radiohead record also in the list [Kid A] were both very instrumental in leading me into that next stage of discovering electronic music. I don’t think I discovered Squarepusher through Kid A, although I discovered most other similar electronic music via it. If I recall correctly, I got into Squarepusher through drumming and playing bass guitar. I was hanging out on a lot of newsgroups at the time back when [the social network] Usenet was a thing because it was the 90s and the early 00s, and I was quite a geeky kid. There were a few weirdos in the drumming newsgroup that I used to hang out in who were into IDM, but weirdly I didn’t get into jungle at the time at all.
Squarepusher was very interesting to me because there was this very clear red thread between musicianship with instruments and how you could push that even further with a computer to make something that was quite adjacent to what you would play on a drum kit. I also think I was listening to a lot of Weather Report at the time and there’s a song on Feed Me Weird Things [‘The Swifty’] that suddenly breaks out halfway into this really beautiful bass solo that references their track ‘Havona’, so I was like, ‘Aaah, this is totally unfamiliar music, but I recognise this’.
