After eight albums reaching and thoroughly satisfying the converted, I'm picking up signs this time that SQUAREPUSHER and label Warp are looking for a move towards major public acclaim. Electronic music, drum n' bass and sampling hardly qualify as weird any more, obviously. They're all over the adverts, the footie highlights and the game-show theme tunes. With Four Tet clutched to many top ten album of the year bosoms, the world and his iPod must be ready for Tom Jenkinson. And no one could deny the prolific 28 year old's right to inherit some recognition way beyond his much-admired Chelmsford bedroom.
What we seem to have here is a virtuoso spread of techniques and textures that any musical palette can relish. There will be bits that you might want to spit back out (depending on your personal listening history). But if it’s sumptuous classical guitar arpeggios that set your teeth on edge, there's always some severe industrial vibration noise to get your heart racing. If jazz bass and whoops from an imaginary crowd get your goat, then settle down with the lamb of crystalline chord development, real melodies and dynamic drum fills. It is clear that any listener, drawn in by the aural delights of their immediate favourites will be able to move on and become fascinated and delighted by the more "challenging" bits that orignally barred the way to the personal chocolate and cherry moments. Before you know where you are you'll be putting it on the stereo as the family sit down to Sunday dinner, or whacking up the volume as you usher out the insurance man and get set up for your Friday Night down town.
One of the dangers the album flirts with is the fragmentation of so many short pieces and so many approaches. It does mean, of course, that there is a regular disruption of any listener descent into inattention or complacency. And there is a unifying device of sorts – the outdoor jazz festival audience and an artist addressing the throng are faded in and out as the album evolves. So even when Jenkinson leaves us for another galaxy, that audience's shouts and whistles keep us somewhere in the field, with a reminder of the human origins of all the technological bamboozlement.
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Without going track by track through all the delights (every track has its scintillating or gratifying moments), "Ultravisitor" as an album (Ultravistor is also the title of the first epic track) has two qualities to cut out and keep.
Firstly Jenkinson is a master of scale. Electronic or computer music makes the imagined scale of any event a sensational possibility. A bass line can be speeded up or slowed down to emulate stellar objects, evoke huge underground caves or zoom in to sub-molecular detail. Industrial noise can cover the floor with the tiniest razor sharp fragments or sit like a choking nausea in the deepest spectrum of your decayed hearing. Squarepusher revels in all this.
Secondly he's happy to pull in conventional musical themes and devices for long enough to let the sudden electronic or computer-aided extensions make a dramatic journey beyond the limitations with a great lurch of excitement. So don’t be afraid. Clutch the safety bars of Jenkinson's fabulous drum n' bass and grin like a fool as he dives off the edge into the juddering waves of cyberland. When you are the Ultravistor, you can spend time behaving and listening in ways that you wouldn't dare do at home in Pontefract. Give it a go.
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