Behind Squarepusher’s Sonic Wizardry

That an artist with such a clear vision is wary of outside influence is just one of many paradoxes surrounding Squarepusher. Among electronic musicians, Jenkinson is an anomaly: a deeply expressive instrumentalist in the cold, clinical world of laptop-wielding DJs and producers. As a bass player, Jenkinson is a reluctant star, a brilliant technician disinclined to demonstrate his skills. A modern-day Wizard of Oz, the maverick British composer is a master of illusion. Blurring the lines between organic and synthetic sound sources—not to mention the boundaries between any number of musical genres—Jenkinson loves to keep people guessing.

Squarepusher’s provocative, postmodern mish-mash of bebop, electronica, and avant-garde is some of the most challenging music out there. But Squarepusher’s latest, Hello Everything, presents an intriguing—and ultimately rewarding—portrait of the artist. A mélange of bewildering jungle beats, introspective sonic exploration, blistering bass work, and positively psychotic synth sounds, the record isn’t bass-heavy by any means; in fact, its bass features are scant at best. But catch a few of Jenkinson’s bop-flavored melodic flourishes, and you’ll realize the man can play. Amid an onslaught of electronic bleeps and breakbeats, bass solos blow by so quickly you barely have the chance to glean their rhyme or reason, Tom’s ferocious technique facilitating the high-speed transfer of musical data.

Tom Jenkinson is one of the music world’s brightest talents, and he certainly has a story to tell. Problem is, he doesn’t really care to share—Bass Player couldn’t even get him on the phone to discuss Hello Everything. Rather, Tom opted out of engaging in a proper dialogue, electing to communicate on his own terms via email. It’s fitting: A bass wizard reluctant to reveal his powers, an electronica legend loath to tell his tale. What follows is a rare glimpse behind Squarepusher’s guarded veil.

How did you learn to play?
I taught myself when I was ten. The classical guitar was the first instrument I owned, but it was really an introductory point—the first instrument to have resounding significance for me was the bass guitar. That was a year later.
An early insight into the psychological make-up of electric guitar players put me off guitar. My driving rationale was an intrigue with what underpins the general sound picture in modern music. Everybody is acquainted with the singing voice, and most could identify an electric guitar, but the bass is more mysterious. Certainly the bass register is familiar, but the sound of the bass guitar is typically hidden toward the back of a mix. I found myself drawn to this strange sonic hinterland. On the rare occasions when exposed bass lines could be heard, I found the deep tones very appealing, and had to know more.
The first bass I owned was a Gibson EB-0 copy made by Kay. The neck was warped, the intonation was permanently way out of tune, it sounded horrible and played awfully—I loved it! I used to take it into school and irritate the music department at lunchtime. (This was far preferable to being reminded how bad I was at football.) I used to draw pictures of it on my exercise books, and I even made paper cut-out versions for my toy action figure to play.

What do you try to accomplish with your music?
One of the more difficult technical challenges that I have undertaken in my career thus far is making the sound source of a particular musical part ambiguous—making it hard to tell whether it was played by me or some sort of machine. Sometimes I enjoy making it very obvious, but I could certainly present examples that would take a highly trained ear to discern how the music was played. The electronic sounds and acoustic sounds sit easily with each other in my music because of my interest in blurring the boundaries between live playing and sequenced material.
On Hello Everything, for example, “The Modern Bass Guitar?” was tracked playing my bass through a MIDI converter. Thus, the data of the musical performance is encoded note-to-note and resolved to a finite set of parameters, the typical parameters being pitch, volume, and duration. In the instance of this track, the sounds being controlled by my bass are actually generated by computer programs. As such the title is an oblique joke about the character of the modern bass having nothing to do with its inherent sound-making capacity. Ha, ha...

How does your compositional process work?
My working process was established a long time before I had the chance to release a record. I’ve been making music in roughly the same fashion since I was 17. I am militantly self-sufficient in this regard, even to the potential detriment of my music; I just don’t want other people involved.

Why not?
The only way I can stay true to my aim is to insulate myself from outside influences. That is not to say that I am not interested in people’s opinions of what I do, but those people tend to be my friends and family, not big-time musicians or music industry types. My deliberate ignorance of public opinion is not out of disregard for the audience; it is out of being aware of my own fallibility. I know that I am persuadable and thus do not want external opinion distracting me from my experiments—I need to follow this aim as singularly as possible to ensure the validity of the results. I never look at record sales figures, to ensure that I have no idea which albums people liked or didn’t like. I am not really that interested. My opinion is that it is best to generally ignore what everyone other than my friends and family thinks about me and my music. There really isn’t enough time to care.

Who are the bass players you most admire?
I am generally reticent to enumerate influences; it is difficult to know where to start and where to stop. I have had many, not all of them musical. The sounds of everyday life can be as fascinating as any piece of music. I particularly enjoy the sorts of sounds that can be made with large pieces of metal—striking a metal handrail, or the sounds that railway tracks make just before a train arrives at a station.
There really are so many good players. Typically my favorite bassists are those who have done something un-bass-like. The first bass player I really identified as doing something beyond the typical bass player fare was John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin. I pretty much learned my bass rudiments from Led Zeppelin II. The way he played complex parts with a relaxed approach was immediately appealing; I instinctively dislike “try hard” musicians. Another early favorite was Cliff Burton from Metallica. He was a real eccentric player—those early records are peppered with his strange melodic decorations, in particular the bizarre solo piece “Anesthesia,” which seemed to combine biker rock with gothic harmony and industrial noise. Colin Hodgkinson on Black Door’s 1973 self-titled album is way ahead of his time, managing to seamlessly interweave bass lines with melodies.
One of the problems of checking out good musicians, particularly bassists and guitarists, is that the best technicians often end up making horrible music. A friend of mine terms it “CD jazz.” In a sense, this sort of “muso” music is more akin to sport than music. It seems a rule of thumb that musicians who are technically advanced tend to end up playing in bands that only other musicians listen to. Thus I sensed an engaging challenge would be to be as technically proficient as possible—not to make a secret of it—and yet try to make it accessible to an audience outside of the muso crowd. Highly developed skill is unfamiliar to most people; as such, it can easily alienate the audience. Fortunately not everybody at my gigs has a beard, spectacles, and a notebook handy … I must be doing something right!

Describe melody, as it relates to your music.
I read on the sleeve notes to a particular edition of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds that Brian Wilson had wanted to organize the sounds on that album such that the audience felt loved by them. When I first read that remark I found it very touching, but the sentiment was a long way from my own intentions, which were more along the lines of trying to stimulate and surprise. I was far more concerned with my lofty aims of trying to promote questioning of conventional musical ideas to take Brian Wilson’s comment seriously. However, it stuck in my mind.
I have entertained radical opinions on the overtly melodic aspects of my music in the past. Out of my first few albums, the pieces that seemed most popular were the ones in which I had invoked the emotion-provoking melodic aspect. The fact that this emotion-provoking aspect seemed a clear-cut door to success led me to a conundrum: On the one hand I could capitalize on this ability and keep generating more popular records, with the disadvantage that I was negating my free exploration of musical possibilities for the sake of success. The alternative was to abandon the concept of explicit melody, thereby necessitating exploration of new ways to construct music and enhance creative momentum, with the possible risk of terminating my career if nobody turned out to agree.

What has your approach been, then?
Rather than trotting out melodic ability ad infinitum, I’ve suppressed it to see if I could somehow bring about new methods of musical resolution to replace my time-honored ones associated with melody. After Big Loada, my attempts were to make music that in general did not use the method of rousing melody to generate a musical focal point. At times I did capitulate on this aim—for example “My Sound” [Music Is Rotted One Note] and “Iambic 5 Poetry” [Budakhan Mindphone].
My thinking began to change away from this point of view a few years ago. I started to think about using conventional melodic content again, but this time inspired partially by Brian Wilson’s comments. On my first albums I used melody ad hoc, wherever it seemed appropriate. More recently, I began to use and investigate it intentionally. Instead of making music by rigorously investigating musical principles, my inclination became to subsume these principles under the concept of making a music specifically for people. I shy away from making the claim that it would make somebody feel “loved”—that seems too simple. Nonetheless, I have attempted in this work to make my ideas tangible to listeners without specialist learning through the vehicle of melody. The age-old question is whether making this compromise does in any positive sense make more esoteric musical ideas more intelligible to non-specialist audiences. The criticism would be that in watering down these ideas, they change fundamentally and are thus no longer the same ideas. Regardless, they are represented more comprehensively on other records, and I hope Hello Everything can offer a less intimidating gateway to these.