An Interview with Squarepusher
Words by Nolan Gawron
Rising to prominence in the mid 1990s, Squarepusher’s Tom Jenkinson would go on to play an integral role in the UK’s heyday of electronic music.
With his unique styles and continual exploration of sound, Jenkinson became part of an influential group of fellow experimental EDM artists and aural allies that helped define and diversify a bourgeoning genre that was still trying to define itself from the ground up.
Shapeshifting from breakneck BPMs and anxiety-inducing polyrhythmic attacks, to soothing atmospherics and shimmering comedowns, Squarepusher has taken on just about every style under the electronic umbrella, sometimes in the course of a single album. With eighteen releases over twenty-four-years, Jenkinson has explored the far reaches of drum and bass, hip-hop, jazz, dance and downtempo. He released a record of solo bass guitar songs, played with the London Sinfonietta and even soundtracked a children’s show on the BBC to ease kids into sleep. His latest record, Be Up a Hello, was released in January on Warp Records. We caught up with Jenkinson via telephone to talk about his approach to music creation, and how it’s changed over time.
What inspired this new record? Did you have sound or mood in mind?
The first thing I should say is I don’t always have a record in mind. Quite often, when I’m working in the studio, the consideration to make records is actually quite distant from my mind. This particular record was brought on by quite specific circumstances. In January 2018, I was in Norway and slipped on some ice and broke my wrist. Obviously this would be painful for any person, but for me as a guitar player—guitars are essential to my life, forget about my work, they’re essential to my existence. It was pretty terrifying. It was a bone that has a nerve running through it, so there was a possibility of losing feeling in my fingers and things like this. It was a pretty stressful time. But apart from everything else, it meant there wasn’t any possibility of proceeding with any composition work that involved musical instruments that you play. I was actually working on the quartet with the London Sinfonietta Orchestra, but that was also requiring my input as a bass player, so I had to pause that. It led me to a bit of forced time off and I came around to thinking that what I wanted to do was to get back to my roots working with electronics in music.
This was also consolidated by the fact that a couple months after that, a very close friend of mine died. As kids we had a very avid shared interest in electronic instruments. He was a scientifically minded guy, so we would spend a lot of time figuring out how these things worked and the principles behind them. When that happened, it really strengthened this desire to return to this basic palette of instrumentation because it was the very same instruments that I began to acquire back in the day with my friend Chris. I guess in some way, I was trying to make sense of the situation and pay some kind of tribute to him.
Because of the stress of all that stuff, I was looking for a bit of a comfort zone. I wanted to return to this wonderful time where everything was completely fresh and just start again, basically. I set about just working on music with no objective but to enjoy myself. I started making one track a day, just for fun, and with no real idea that it was going to lead to anything. At that phase it was just about music as a therapeutic tool. I was trying to restore my state of my mind, really. I started to enjoy it, finding new ways to get new sounds out of these old instruments. As things went on, I started to spend longer on the pieces and eventually they started to be the kinds of pieces that I would consider releasing. I make a lot of work just for fun, or an experiment like an artist sketchbook. It’s there to try out an idea; it’s not something to show the world. It’s an exercise for me to try and prove or disprove something.
How has your process of creating music evolved over the years? How much did technology change the way you make a record?
I have a very simplistic outlook on this. I have always just used what was in front of me. I’m not a gearhead. I have always tried to find something new that I can do with something old, rather than buying a new instrument. This, for me, is part of a broader mentality that I think is healthier. I think if you’re just trying to make music with your checkbook then you’re soft and you’re heading in the wrong direction. It can bring inspiration, but in the end it’s an inanimate box or a software interface. It’s going to have a limited capacity to inspire in its own right. I think the general source of inspiration and excitement has to just come from within you. That’s what I’m always trying to preserve. My basic rule that sits beneath any considerations about music— whether it’s harmony, rhythm, style, technique—the basic thing that underpins it is to preserve my enthusiasm, because without that, there is nothing at all.
As someone who plays all the instruments on your records, do you find it discouraging that advancements in technology have made it possible for people to create music without ever learning to play?
I am aware of a certain kind of snobbery about using machines and electronics in general that can exist in the minds of people who have spent a lot of time developing their technique on say, the guitar or the drums. I think in that person’s mind they view the drum machine as a cheat and a shortcut and it bypasses all of the hard work and all of the love and all of the energy and commitment that went into making them a good player. I personally don’t care about any of that stuff. I try to approach the given instrument or music-making on its own merits. I try to look at it as objectively as I can. I try to look at it as a set of degrees of freedom. In that way, you can make a bass guitar analogous to a synth or a drum machine. It makes certain options available and shuts other options off. All instruments can be looked at in that way. They each have their histories which can inform how you use them. You can ignore the history. You can try to throw it away, you can try to rewrite it, but it’s always going to be there. There’s a lot going on when you pick up any instrument, whether it’s a drum machine, a synth, a guitar, a bass, whatever. I try to look at the thing for what it is, as accurately as I can, and try to understand how it works, see what it can do and see if I can use it to express the things that I give a shit about. An instrument can come and go with me if I can really access anything that corresponds with what I’m into. That’s not to say there’s anything bad about it. To me, that kind of snobbery is nothing more than a defense mechanism. For me, that negativity is the sense of ‘I don’t understand this, it doesn’t correspond with what I know, I don’t like it and I want it to go away.’ But things don’t have to be like that. You can actually approach it with an open mind and you can see what you can get from it. The sort of snobbery that I’m talking about, you can still see it, but I think it’s gradually getting eroded.
By now people can see that if you want a live drum sound, you’re going to have to play it. If you want that rocksteady mechanical impact that you get out of a drum machine, you can’t make drums do that. You can try and you can get close, but if you want the real deal, you just have to plug in the TR-909. They do different things and I think that it’s snobbish to think one is superior. It’s a highway to nowhere, a waste of energy. With an open mind you can get great things from both. Actually, with Hard Normal Daddy, one of my more conscious motives was to try and blur that zone between the live and the programmed. The fascinating thing about this dichotomy is that you can find inspiration flying both ways. When I was starting out in my teenage years and listening to Acid House records and LFO [Low-Frequency Oscillation], rave records, early Hardcore Breakbeat and so on, I tried to adapt by playing my bass guitar along to those records. I was trying to cover them. I was taking an inspiration from that lockstep brutality that you can really only get out of a sequencer. On Hard Normal Daddy, I was trying to do programming that was indistinguishable. You kind of don’t know which is which. I like the feeling of those boundaries collapsing because that’s an exciting place to be, when you don’t quite know what’s happening. That’s always where I like to be when I’m writing. There’s always an element that’s slightly, slightly gone out of your control.
What is the intent of your music and has it changed over time?
Music-making to me is a huge umbrella, and underneath it there can be any number of different points of focus; they do range from very austere technical and intellectual concerns to just trying to make myself feel good, or trying to put a piece of music out there that is more of a lament where I’m trying to move people. It really can vary, you know. I realise that from the outside, my work has this kind of haphazard nature, that there’s a type of rollercoaster veering this way and that. I’m sure some people find that incoherent and that it doesn’t add up to a broad picture of an artist. All I’m doing is being honest when I put my work together. If an idea has run out of steam, that’s it. I’m not going to pursue it because I feel obliged to, or have a duty to. For me, the uncanny and exciting nature is that you set out on a journey and you never totally know where it’s going to lead. You start with very dry and technical considerations to get yourself going, and all of a sudden you make a piece of music that is everybody’s favourite. For me, you safeguard the enthusiasm by pursuing what’s interesting to you and you hope for the best.
Would you say your music has gone through different phases, and if so were you conscious of the changes as they were happening or is it something that you were able to analyze after the fact?
Yeah, I think it would be silly to deny. For example, I made a record called Music Is Rotted One Note that came out in 1998 that followed Big Loada and Hard Normal Daddy the previous year, and the whole way the music was made was completely different. I was completely rebuilding my music recording process from the ground up. There were some different objectives floating around as well as different techniques of recording and composing. Those eras I think are plain to hear.
Have you ever become completely disenchanted with music?
The thing is, I’ve always been fascinated by music, even going back to my earliest memories. Some of the first things that I bought as a child was a tape recorder, a stereo and speakers, so I could record the radio and discover music. Today, in a broad way, it’s still the same. I never get bored of it. The thing is it’s always steering off in different directions, so it’s not just about the core considerations of melody, harmony and rhythm. It can veer off into seemingly quite distant considerations with programming or intellectual considerations, conceptual, and so on. Part of the story for me is keeping this variety. It’s always in flux. Really, there’s very little that doesn’t connect with music in my world, so it’s always possible to replenish and steer off to a different path. It’s just what I’ve done instinctively since I was a kid. I just follow my interest. It wasn’t from any study or an academic discipline. I didn’t have any training. I would just come at it as a music lover. It’s simple, and if that’s the rule, then you can’t get bored. You’ll always find something else.
I was pretty taken aback when I read that you were chosen to do the soundtrack for BBC’s CBeebies, a television program meant to ease kids to sleep. How did that come about?
I think it was a series of brave productions choices by the BBC. I, myself, was surprised. I’m worldly enough to be aware of the stereotypes that exist around me and my work. I try to ignore them, honestly, but it’s impossible to not be aware. According to those stereotypes, Squarepusher is not who you go to for a children’s TV program. This is why it was brave and insightful. I think they were looking at my music on a slightly different basis than this stereotype of being ‘hell for leather,’ high BPMs and aggressive aesthetic. I think they were looking more at the melody and honing in on the harmony. In that dimension, and perhaps some of the aspect brought forth by my instrumental playing, that’s what they wanted to harness for this program. I had a couple of really interesting conversations with the producer. We talked a little bit about Oliver Postgate, who was a producer for children’s television for the BBC back in the 1970s. He also made some music for those programs I used to love as a kid. So we discovered some common ground and got going. The music had to be simplistic, there had to be space, there were certain things that were completely off limits. So, consequently, the work I do is filling in the details in my compositions. These pieces, however, were very easy to do because that intricacy wasn’t required. It was a lot of fun. We disagreed on a few things. I put forward some music that they found a little too disturbing, and we kind of argued about that. I said, ‘Well, children love fucked up stuff. They’re not good as gold. They love screwed up stuff.’ I was really trying to push the envelope, but we ended up with a good compromise.
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