SQUAREPUSHER
Budakhan Mindphone
(Warp)
It's quite right that virulent ridicule should be aimed at bands who
bleat that they only make music for themselves. The same kind of people
who think watching Jill Dando on Holiday actually constitutes travelling,
they skip the context, history and reactive potential that music sparks
and end up dull, and possibly dead.
When it comes to the world of avantronica, though, the same line suddenly
becomes essential. Living in your head is the Omen-style mark of the
lunatic genius, the one who can't care what other people think because
he's locked up in his skull, bouncing off the walls.
With his fifth release in two years, Tom Jenkinson is a man with a lot to
get out of his system, one that seems on the brink of collapsing into
piles of blinking circuitry any minute. Leering out of the same cryogenic
mists as his 'friend' Aphex Twin, Squarepusher also has another deadly
weapon in his arsenal: jazz. Last year's 'Music Is Rotted One Note' was a
greenish, maggoty slab of jazz decomposition, and its residue is still
visible here, particularly on the double-jointed click of 'Splask' and
'Two Bass Hit (Dub)'.
Yet without the precise structure of unnervingly slapped basslines, or
his earlier hard-bodied d&b, 'Budakhan Mindphone' isn't so much a
coherent record as a piece of anti-virus software, a debugging programme
that lets all the glitches and blotches scree across the screen and onto
disc. Of course, that should ensure Squarepusher's next release is a
shiny masterpiece of linearity, yet this mini-LP just promises more
layers of static. It's a disintegration, a slow rubbing away of reason
and structure, and starting with 'Iambic 5 Poetry' seems like the man's
idea of a joke. There's an introductory drum roll, pretty and chiming,
but as the title suggests, its formality is almost Shakespearian compared
with the syntactical Armageddon that follows.
By the time he closes with the frightening-as-it-sounds 'Acid Gong', he's
faded out to a core that's not so much hard as virtually impossible -
little more than aesthetic tinnitus, a ricocheting patter and drone, like
a gamelan in a cyclone. In between is sense swirling away, whether evil
gibbering pouncing out from the ambient fronds of 'The Tide', or the
blister-burst crisis point of 'Varkatope'. You care because, God, someone
really should.
In a half-lit room somewhere in his skull, Tom Jenkinson is dancing fast.
He's just making music for himself and if anyone else likes it, it's a
miracle. 7/10
Victoria Segal
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