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“It’s a very good point, because I’m talking about these visual representations, but the album of course doesn’t feature them apart from stills in the artwork. Do you conceive of Ufabulum as something that, to be fully appreciated, has to be an audiovisual experience? Obviously it’s incredibly striking, and it’s a great example of a track that made an impression at the same time as the visuals made an impression – a complete, holistic, experience. That’s interesting in light of the ‘Dark Steering’ video. Rather than trying to do a load of visual interpretations at the end and tacking it all on, so to speak, I’ve been working on it at the same time as the music to try and afford as much coherence and as much of a link between the visual and the sonic aspects as I can.” So, I’d say that this album’s been quite wildly different, because I’ve been switching from music to visual mode and back and forth throughout the process. What I’ve been doing is working on visual representations of the pieces as concurrent with working on the music itself, with the aim being to show those visual representations on that LED mask which is shown on the front cover of both of those records. “The concept of that is being used again, but actually it’s brought about a fundamental difference, not only between this album and Shobaleader, but also between this album and everything else I’ve ever made. the LED mask that features on the front cover. This album is attempting to make a sort of development of what was being used in experimental form on Shobaleader One, i.e. And secondly, that, as you rightly say, there’s a shared focus in the artwork. It’s probably easier to talk about the differences, first of which being that there’s absolutely no instrumental playing – no instrumental live performance – on this record. I’m in agreement with you: there is actually a fair amount of shared ground, shall we say, between the two. You’re actually the first person to have done so. How do you see the new record relating to its predecessor? They both have quite similar artwork, and there’s this shared digital processing going on in both of them. It struck me that there was some sort of through-line between Ufabulum and the Shobaleader One record. “I’m still trying to catch up with ideas I had when I was a teenager.” FACT’s Joseph Morpurgo spoke to Jenkinson about LED masks and the importance of the ‘pop principle’. It’s a sleek digital fantasia, veering from convulsive d’n’b through to mangled boogie funk, all the while struck through with a bright ersatz gleam. If 2009’s Solo Electric Bass 1 saw Jenkinson showcasing his instrumental chops, Ufabulum hones in directly on sounds artificial and cybertronic. 2010’s skewed ensemble effort Shobaleader One: d’Demonstrator showed Jenkinson navigating an idiosyncratic path between the acoustic and the digital.Īhead of his performance at this years’ Dour Festival, Jenkinson returns this month with Ufabulum, arguably his most brazen release in almost a decade. Pic’n’mix selections Ultravisitor and Hello Everything really brought Jenkinson’s astonishingly virtuoso bass playing to the fore. Throughout the Noughties, his output became increasingly diverse. His earliest records (the Rephlex-released Feed Me Weird Things and Music Is Rotted One Note in particular) are prime examples of the sort of hyperkinetic electronica that came to define Warp Records’ glory years. The album won critical praise, notably garnering a rarely high 9.8 from Pitchfork Media.Tom Jenkinson – Squarepusher – forever strives to surprise. It disgusted me that it was so easy to appeal to people and I thus introduced arbitrary rules to make it harder. This was because I had come to see it as a cheap way of getting people to like my music. One was that I was to abandon the overt usage of melody. There were also other principles at play at this time relating to harmonic content. I just wanted to get really fucking loose and just start again somehow. The sequencer is too square, too digital. One of the reasons that I headed in that direction as opposed to the more computer sequence-type stuff is because I was actually beginning to feel really limited using sequencers and samplers.I was really beginning to yearn for the sort of unpredictability of the randomness of improvising with live instruments.
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Many of the tracks instead have a 'live' feel, featuring virtuoso playing by Squarepusher on the drums and bass guitar. The album production did not involve any sequencing or sampling equipment, which had featured heavily on Squarepusher's previous work.