from SPIN Magazine

Squarepusher Q&A: A Chat With Electronic Music’s Own David Foster Wallace

May 17 2012, 8:03 AM ET
by Philip Sherburne

Tom Jenkinson on video synthesizers, synaesthesia and self-indulgence

Seventeen years ago, Squarepusher (Tom Jenkinson) began his career as a breakbeat gadfly, chopping up jungle with Jaco Pastorius into a style known briefly as “drill ‘n’ bass” (or, better still, “weirdy-beardy”). Since then, across a dozen albums, he has established himself as one of electronic music’s least predictable musicians, capable of infectious 2-step garage, sepulchral ambient, molecular breakbeat science and even an entire album of solo electric bass. Fair-weather fans might snicker, “Spinal Tap Mark II performs Jazz Odyssey,” but anyone who really knows Squarepusher — a gauntlet he threw down with 2002’s Do You Know Squarepusher — recognizes that there’s a method to his madness.

Jenkinson is famous for meticulously constructed rhythms and audacious, even alienating, stylistic shifts, and both qualities are readily apparent in a conversation with him. He’s cordial, candid and 100 percent engaged, but I’ve never heard another musician speak in such analytical terms about his own work — terms that might sound cold, until you realize the extent to which his right-angled career is as conceptual as it is wildly expressionistic.

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