Probably a bit late, but if anybody’s interested there is a programme on BBC Two at 2100 tonight about the last recorded fatal duel to be held in Scotland. It happened 200 years ago on a field just outside Kirkcaldy. Should be an interesting programme.
Archive: BBC Two
The reviews were pretty mixed, but Squarepusher’s tenth album, Hello Everything, has turned out to be a pleasant surprise.
The bright and breezy ‘Look Around You‘-style cover and pink artwork somehow doesn’t suit Squarepusher’s image as a dark and angry fellow. But don’t let that deceive you. The most notable thing about this album is how much it sounds like Squarepusher — and you couldn’t mistake it for anybody else.
Since he emerged ten years ago, Squarepusher has taken his fans on a bit of a journey. It’s not unusual for acoustic instruments and full-on electronic music to appear together, but often it’s as a bit of a gimmick. Squarepusher does it as though it’s the normal thing to do. His electronic music is as good as anybody’s, but he’s also a bloody demon on the bass guitar. Check out this live video of Hello Everything‘s opening track, ‘Hello Meow’.
His appearance on The Culture Show showed how intense he is when playing the bass guitar with all those involuntary facial expressions pulled. (Unfortunately the appearance also showed us his receeding hairline and the fact that he only has one shirt, although he makes up for it with his splendid beard.)
It was this amazing combination of virtuoso bass playing and intricate electronica that initially turned heads with Squarepusher’s emergence ten years ago. But along the way Squarepusher has experimented with the formula a lot. There was the murky, woozy yet captivating Music is Rotted One Note, an album that sounds like it’s melting all the way through.
Then there was Go Plastic and Do You Know Squarepusher, a pair of albums that almost completely dispensed with the bass guitar. In Ultravisitor the bass guitar made its triumphant return in a quasi-live album that sounded as if it owed more to prog rock than the Amen break.
But Hello Everything isn’t a surprise like that. This sounds like classic Squarepusher straight away. Some of these tracks could have easily been at home on his first album, Feed Me Weird Things. ‘Bubble Life’ harks back to Selection Sixteen.
If I was pressed, I would say the main difference to Squarepusher’s past work is that Hello Everything sounds quite space-like. The intense ‘Planetarium’, an instant stand-out, is unashamedly cosmic.
Like Ultravisitor, the style and mood skips from track to track. So as well as the drum and bass tracks we have the more thoughtful, relaxing moments. ‘Theme From Sprite’ is a very cool track that sounds like it should be played in a smokey jazz bar. Nice! There is also the irresistably beautiful ‘Circlewave 2′.
Also included with Hello Everything is a ‘bonus CD’ entitled Vacuum Tracks. Unfortunately, it is extremely boring. Almost twenty minutes of inconsequential bleeps and whoooos that go absolutely nowhere. One track in this style, ‘Vacuum Garden’, was included on Hello Everything itself, and that was quite enough thank you very much.
More successful is the Welcome to Europe 12-inch / digital single. ‘Hanningfield Window’ is a fine track, but ‘Exciton’ is the one that really grabs you by the balls. I’d like Squarepusher to do more tracks like this!
All-in-all, Vacuum Tracks aside, Squarepusher’s new music is a great success. I was actually a bit iffy about Squarepusher until the release of Ultravisitor. Ever since then I’ve come to appreciate his older music more. For me, Hello Everything just underlines the fact that Tom Jenkinson is one of the finest musicians around at the moment.
An intereting video has appeared on Google Video. It’s a documentary about hypertext made in 1990 by Douglas Adams (via Boing Boing). This was made at roughly the same time as the WWW was invented, but this programme mostly reminds me of those interactive CD-Rom encyclopedias you used to get in the 1990s. I also like the way Adams makes interactive TV sound so wonderful. Little did he know that 15 years down the line it would basically amount to little more than “Press red to learn more about lighting your farts.”
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I seem to be having trouble posting a comment on Will’s blog, so I’ll say my bit here. He gives us advance warning that this week’s edition of Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe is a 50 minute long US edition, which means that it clashes with Time Trumpet! I wouldn’t have realised that!
Did they mention it at the end of last week’s Screen Wipe? I didn’t notice it. It’s pretty poor scheduling aswell. Surely there will be a lot of people who want to watch both Time Trumpet and Screen Wipe. I guess I’ll be watching the repeat of Screen Wipe then.
Update: Here is some related advice from Harry Hutton. Hear hear!
Here is an article trying to explain why Top of the Pops is no longer needed (via DJ Martian). It contains all the usual cheesy stuff about how everybody now watches music on MySpace or whatever rather than the television.
In my view there is still a place for a television programme such as Top of the Pops. The problem with TOTP in recent years was that its latest revamp, spearheaded by early 90s television icon Andi Peters, did look like something striaght out of the early 90s, right down to Fearne Cotton’s clothes. They even reverted to the early 90s theme tune! And that doesn’t get people thinking, “hey, that’s cool!” like with that Led Zeppelin one.
TOTP wasn’t axed because people don’t want to watch music on television. It was axed because it became bad.
Anyway, from that Guardian article, here is some wise guy’s “rescue plan” for TOTP:
Dylan White, director of promotions at Anglo Plugging… has proposed a rescue plan – essentially dividing it in two, with one version for 35-55-year-olds and another for the-under 15s
Er, did that not already exist in the form of TOTP2 and TOTP Saturday?
(Incidentally, here is a post I wrote when TOTP moved to BBC Two a year ago.)
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