Squarepusher

Known as Squarepusher, Tom Jenkinson produces intricate, experimental drum’n’bass marked by a pronounced progressive jazz influence and a deliberate effort to dismantle the genre’s standard conventions. As a proficient bassist and multi-instrumentalist, he incorporates fretless bass lines throughout his recordings, forging one of the clearest links to jazz traditions, even as his composed structures often mirror jazz precedents as closely as his instrumental technique. His debut album, Feed Me Weird Things, issued in 1996 on Richard “Aphex Twin” James’s Rephlex imprint, fused rapid jungle rhythms with Aphex-style synthesizer palettes, eccentric melodic turns, and ensemble passages that evoked the jazz-fusion innovations of Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report. Following the refinement of his drum’n’bass and fusion synthesis on 1997’s Hard Normal Daddy, Jenkinson explored divergent directions across later releases. The 1998 album Music Is Rotted One Note ventured successfully into acoustic jazz without electronic sequencing, while 2001’s Go Plastic fused U.K. garage elements with fractured, hyperactive jungle patterns. The expansive 2003 project Ultravisitor encompassed jazz, IDM, and musique concrète within a single ambitious statement. In 2008 he pursued prog-rock territory with Just a Souvenir before assembling the forward-looking funk ensemble Shobaleader One. Subsequent solo work returned to purely electronic textures, as heard on 2020’s Be Up a Hello, which revived the elevated tempos and analog instrumentation of his earliest recordings. The 2024 release Dostrotime similarly pulsed with exuberance born from the enforced stillness of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

Jenkinson absorbed the work of jazz masters Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Art Blakey alongside dub innovators Augustus Pablo and King Tubby during his formative years. The child of a jazz drummer, he took up bass and drums while still in school. Exposure to electronic music via experimental electro-techno figures LFO and Carl Craig prompted him to merge breakbeat-driven techno with post-bop avant-garde and progressive jazz. Although he has voiced a stronger identification with jazz than with jungle, his Squarepusher and Duke of Harringay EPs—issued after his relocation from Chelmsford to Harringay—were initially viewed as eccentric distortions of jungle’s core methods yet attracted listeners drawn to post-acid house experimental music. The diverse full-length Feed Me Weird Things surfaced on Rephlex in 1996, followed soon after by the Port Rhombus EP, which initiated his extended association with Warp. That label released the jazz-inflected Hard Normal Daddy together with Burningn’n Tree, a compilation drawn from his early Spymania EPs, in 1997. American audiences grew more familiar with Squarepusher when Trent Reznor’s Nothing label issued the Big Loada CD, encompassing the Big Loada EP, additional Warp tracks from the period, and Chris Cunningham’s pioneering video for “Come on My Selector.”

Critical regard for Jenkinson reached a high point with 1998’s Music Is Rotted One Note, on which he performed as a one-man fusion ensemble by multi-tracking drums, bass, and keyboards. The following year brought two EPs—Budakhan Mindphone and Maximum Priest—plus the album Selection Sixteen. Go Plastic arrived in summer 2001, its single “My Red Hot Car” marking the nearest approach to a mainstream success Squarepusher had achieved. Later works such as 2003’s Do You Know Squarepusher and 2004’s Ultravisitor continued to integrate composition, programming, and live musicianship, traits likewise evident on 2006’s Hello Everything and 2008’s proggy Just a Souvenir. After issuing the solo-bass recording Solo Electric Bass, Vol. 1, he introduced the masked quartet Shobaleader One, whose 2010 album Shobaleader One: D’demonstrator delivered retro electronic pop with R&B inflections and synthesized vocals reminiscent of Daft Punk.

Jenkinson reemerged in 2012 with the austere, symphonic Ufabulum, layering an apocalyptic cinematic atmosphere onto his already dense electronic constructions. In 2013 he collaborated with Japanese roboticists on the Z-Machines initiative, designing robots capable of executing passages beyond human technical limits; he contributed compositional guidance for these machines, realized through a 22-armed drumming robot and a guitar-playing robot possessing the dexterity of 78 fingers. Warp Records documented the experiment with the five-track Music for Robots EP the next year. Damogen Furies appeared in 2015, extending Jenkinson’s already unrestrained intensity through saturated, overdriven timbres across beats, synthesizers, and bass lines. Shobaleader One commenced touring in 2016, and Elektrac, featuring full-band live interpretations of earlier Squarepusher material, was released in 2017.

Following years of conceptually driven work, Jenkinson revisited his drill’n’bass origins with the fifteenth studio album Be Up a Hello in 2020, employing vintage hardware synthesizers and basic electronics from his earliest sessions while embracing the impulsive energy and breakneck speeds of those formative experiments. The more restrained companion EP Lamental followed several months later. Warp reissued the long-unavailable Feed Me Weird Things twenty-five years after its original appearance, appending bonus tracks from the Squarepusher Plays… 12". Also in 2021, Jenkinson collaborated with Attacca Quartet and supplied remixes for Danny Elfman and GoGo Penguin. As live performances resumed after the COVID-19 lockdown, he incorporated some of his most intense, rave-oriented material into sets. Dostrotime, shaped by the tranquility of a year without touring obligations, emerged in 2024.