Squarepusher | Warp Factor Nine: “For me it's about being able to operate at different speeds beyond real time”

For the last quarter century, six-string bassist, multi-instrumentalist and electronics innovator Tom Jenkinson has been tearing up the boundaries between sound and genre under the guise of his musical persona, Squarepusher. And while he’s garnered a global following as one of today’s most influential electronic artists, he’s also performed his music with orchestras, free jazz trios and played solo bass guitar concerts. This month sees the release of a 25th anniversary edition of his debut album, Feed Me Weird Things, which is remastered and issued on vinyl for the first time on his longtime label Warp Records. By coincidence, he also appears on Blue Note for the first time as a guest on GoGo Penguin’s ingenious GGP/RMX album, with his version of their track ‘F Major Pixie’ opening with an ear-bending bebop slap bass solo that expands into some gnarly electronica.

Jazzwise editor Mike Flynn spoke to Tom Jenkinson about the remastered reissue of his debut album Feed Me Weird Things, released on 4 June on Warp Records, and his jazz-informed approach to making music beyond limits.

Mike Flynn: The remastering has brought out some really deep bass frequencies and given the whole album more punch and clarity – was that what you intended and are you happy with the result?

Tom Jenkinson: When we remastered the record, we used the original as a sonic reference point and also to compare relative levels between the tracks, length of gaps and so on. It was pretty surprising to hear how different the album sounded to my original DAT tapes. It seemed like a lot of the 1-2 khz band had been filtered out and generally the music sounded over-processed, so the remastering was focused on getting a decent overall balance while retaining the bite in the original recordings – overall how it sounds in the new edition is much closer to my original tapes. The memory of the first mastering session is clouded by drinking several bottles of Champagne so perhaps that's why it ended up sounding so weird.

“For me it's about being able to operate at different speeds beyond real time”

There are times on FMWT when it feels like you’re channelling Herbie Hancock and Jaco at a warehouse party – did these sonic clashes sometimes confuse your listeners when you played them live?

TJ: There were plenty of occasions where playing gigs in those days malfunctioned. On a positive note, I did do quite a variety of different shows including drum & bass raves, small jams in clubs and more chin-stroking electronic events. It didn't always work out well, especially at the more dance-oriented events, but there were some really great and memorable times such as jamming with Talvin Singh at his club night Anohka, whom I'd met at a really nice event organised by ADF in Clerkenwell – incidentally I recently found the running order sheet from that show and it's included with the memorabilia in the new edition of FMWT. The more eclectic events were where things made more sense, unsurprisingly.

There are some great passages of fretless bass on this album – was Jaco’s eclectic attitude to music – for example his love of jazz, funk, fuzzed out Jimi Hendrix style sounds and symphonic works – as much of an inspiration to you as his playing?

TJ: I guess his eclectic attitude was part of why I felt at home with what he did. I've always been on the lookout for figures like that because they are a good antidote to the style-police who may deem this, that and the other music illegal. At a very young age I just searched out the music that I loved to hear, before I understood anything about specific histories of music, and I didn't ever study music or in a sense take it that seriously. It has given me a sprawling mess of references – and something like that is audible in Jaco too.

As well as exploring electronic music and obviously the bass guitar this first album feels like you’re also massively exploring rhythm – is that something about you’ve taken from the intricacies of jazz drumming and the polyrhythmic nature of that?

TJ: There's no denying I'm fascinated by rhythm. Some influence comes from jazz and more directly from the better drummers I played with as a teenager, but in that period for me this influence was strongly modulated by breakbeat programming in jungle. There's something about the brutality and concision of this music that makes it especially immediate and compelling for me. In a way, though this description might sound odd, for me it's more of a pop attitude to virtuosic elaboration, where you get stuck in and totally rinse out the material but in a way where the pulse stays pretty present, and it doesn't go on for ages – kind of a blink-and-you-miss-it attitude. I admire condensing something wild into short spaces of time, before the audience has a chance to drift off and tune out, which may have been a lesson I picked up early on gigging in front of pub audiences in Essex.

“I've always been on the lookout for figures like [Jaco] because they are a good antidote to the style-police who may deem this, that and the other music illegal”

How did you first discover these kinds of rhythmic concepts and find a means to programme them? Did you have someone else to guide you or is it just simply sheer force of will to develop and create your own methods to realise these kinds of sounds?

TJ: I would love to have known some experienced producers to ask questions of in those days but for better or worse my early music making was done in isolation. Aside from a couple of equally clueless mates, there simply wasn't anyone else around that was interested. I dare say some of the disorganised rambling approach I've taken over the years is due to a complete absence of professional input.

TJ: I'd say my major strength in music, above all else, is knowing what comes next. In this context, once I get going on any kind of composition, it is blindingly obvious what each subsequent move should be and there is more or less no deliberation and that allows me to work really fast. In ways it's comparable to improvising on a conventional instrument, just that with programming it's happening at a different pace. Speaking about this stuff with drummers over the years, they are often surprised to hear that I put down drum parts, and sequenced material more generally, in step time. For me it's about being able to operate at different speeds beyond real time – in this case, to fully imagine a piece and retain it clearly in your mind for long enough to put it down in slow motion, because it's too complex to play out live in one hit. You escape what your hands can do in a given tempo. That leads to the surreal funk that I'm addicted to, and it corresponds to what great players can do but is stripped of the limits all human players face. Naturally other limits appear in their place, but that's another story.

You’ve spoken about your admiration and love of the music of jazz’s pioneers in its late 1950s-60s heyday – what are the qualities you take from them?

TJ: Defiance.

Has that mind-set extended into how you push the limits of computers and other technology in your music too?

TJ: It's worth remembering that all musical instruments are technological. A given technology enshrines the state of knowledge at different moments in history but the basic attribute of an object embodying knowledge is the same. An abiding concern of mine is to try to be aware of the effects of given technologies – how a particular instrument with its particular history informs what we might want to do with it. Some instruments have less dense networks of references which perhaps is why I was attracted to bass rather than guitar – the idea of the instrument seemed less well defined to me.

Regarding more recent musical technology where playback of musical information can be automated, a dimension of musical effort is removed and thereby allows the musician to sit back and do more listening, which is obviously attractive, but opens a door to complacency -in the guise of borrowed competence. Still, that's part of why I love it and find it a bit humourous, because it's kind of cheating, which early on in the story of automated music led to opprobrium being heaped on this stuff by traditional musos – that it was fake and all that. Still, rock guitar shredding is only viable because of circuitry and high SPL. A piano is only possible because of extremely fine-tuned mechanisms and maintenance. In our age it seems to me not that much of what we do musically is natural -and recording technology has enabled the most subtle fakery of editing performances into 'natural' perfection and this happens everywhere in music that, you might say hypocritically, makes a virtue of performance.

In that context for me, a great single take with a few flaws always beats a perfected composite. 'Solo Electric Bass' was one take and no edits. And where raw real-time playing collides with sequenced material, the interplay that emerges, as one struggles against the other, is one of my abiding fascinations.

You’ve been working with jazz musicians in recent years – touring with the Shobaleader One band and now contributing a track for the GoGo Penguin remix album – do you find this brings out another side to your music, perhaps letting you step outside of what some people expect from Squarepusher?

TJ: My experience of many great jazz players is that they also like a lot of other music and enjoy playing it, so at least in some cases this distinction seems to be as much a professional one as one that says something intrinsic about the people concerned. I'm guessing that a lot of those people that I've met find what I do refreshing because it shares some attitudes and ideas but doesn't come packaged up that concisely. But in the end, I've fled from such labelling only to end up in my own category. As you imply, Squarepusher is by now a condensed set of ideas and expectations – being brutally clear it is a brand, or an identity distilled into commercial technique. I don't like it, but also I admit that an air of ludicrousness attaches to an anti-branding stance, as that just becomes incorporated in your brand. But still, I will always instinctively loathe this marketing-world shite!

Squarepusher tours the UK this autumn on the following dates: Boiler Shop Newcastle Upon Tyne (23 Oct), Invisible Wind Factory, Liverpool (25 Oct), Brudenell Social Club, Leeds (26 Oct), Brighton Concorde 2, Brighton (27 Oct), Metronome, Nottingham, UK (28 Oct) and The Roundhouse, London (29 Oct) – Feed Me Weird Things Remastered is released on 4 June on Warp Records