Squarepusher's Ufabulum - a style historical perspective

As a pioneer of IDM (intelligent dance music), Tom Jenkinson, aka Squarepusher, has been at the forefront of one of the most difficult genres of music for more than a decade and a half. This genre, a catch-all for “avant garde experimental” dance music, is most notable for its objectionable name and its stylization of dance, or use of dance materials in a non- or less-dance oriented way. Some features of IDM are a tacit disregard for what is musically important to genres around it, a focus on personal experimentation and aesthetic goals, and a history that informs it only if one applies a massive stretch of the imagination.

Squarepusher is essentially reborn with the new album Ufabulum, adding another complicated chapter to the history of IDM. Paradoxically, Ufabulum ranks as one Jenkinson's easiest albums to listen to, in terms of large scale continuity and clearness of vision, but may be one of the hardest to grapple with in terms of where it fits in IDM's history. That is to say that Jenkinson has created something that, unlike most IDM, reflects the current trends and feel of popular electronic music but equally weighs that reflection with what he's been working on for nearly two decades now. It seems that Jenkinson has found a convincing way of making a Squarepusher album for this decade.

“Classic” Squarepusher and Current Trends:

All of Jenkinson's albums can be defined as one of the following: an “instrument album” (Music Is Rotted One Note (1998), Budakhan Mindphone (1999), Hello Everything (2006)), as a “programmed album” (Burning'n Tree (1997), Big Loada (1998), Go Plastic (2001), Ufabulum (2012)) and albums that have a fair balance of electronics and instruments (Feed Me Weird Things (1996), Selection Sixteen (1999), Ultravisitor (2004)). Each album has a different mix of acoustic and electronic elements, and employ different strategies for how to the two worlds interact. The programmed albums have a few consistent elements: dense, frantic “acid” bass-lines; melodic lead synths over active harmonic structures; digitally manipulated timbres; and erratic and disjointed textures in multiple virtual spaces.

The most identifiable element of Jenkinson's older programmed music (namely Go Plastic and Big Loada), is his frantic use of breakbeats (drums sampled from classic drum breaks in soul and R&B music), an element he expands on from the “drum and bass” genre of electronic dance music that was popular in the 1990's. Where most drum and bass employs breakbeats in a one-or two-bar loop, the signature sound of Jenkinson and Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin) is high rhythmic density and not loop-based. In Jenkinson's older works, he favors continuous variation of the breakbeat, often with fast syncopated rhythms. Because of this treatment of the breakbeat, Jenkinson's and James' music has often been referred to as “drill 'n bass.”

This practice, however, is definitively not present in Ufabulum. Instead, its percussion mostly moves at a more diffuse pace, as much popular electronic music currently does. Since the return of electronic dance music to the public eye, there has been a general trend toward steady, predictable backbeats. The most popular electronic acts of the past few years have tended to not stray too far from the backbeat, instead focusing on timbral complexity and movement, while sustaining a repetitive, predictable beat underneath it. More specifically, some of the most popular electronic tracks of recent years have had zero melodic or harmonic construction, and focus entirely on timbral movement for a span of a few bars or a phrase (with as few as one pitch constituting the pitch content of a phrase). The drum elements of this music are also simplistic, but are still, basically, the most important element of the music, as seen in how the music is mixed.

The rise of these musical strategies has been accompanied by the technical, mixing-based techniques of “side-chain compression” (sometimes referred to as “keying”), and drum layering, both of which ensure that the kick drum, in particular, is the loudest element of the song. Side-chain compression automates an attenuation of the synthesizer lines during each occurrence of the kick drum, making the synthesizers decrease in the mix as to not “muddy up” the kick drum, or cover it up. Drum layering is a simple update to traditional additive synthesis techniques: simply using more than one drum sample or synthesizer as if they were one. The resulting sound of these techniques often sees the kick drum being bigger than the rest of the mix, creating a “heavy” sound.

Jenkinson's adoption of these techniques on Ufabulum marks a significant departure from the old “drill 'n bass” sound. It isn't that Jenkinson has set out to make a dubstep album though, as there are a number of differences in how the beats appear on Ufabulum. For instance, on the tracks “Unreal Square,” “Stadium Ice,” and “Energy Wizard,” there are sections which each use a modified backbeat at ~60 BPM, but also use double-time (~120 BPM) structures in other sections. While the faster versions of these tempos are not far removed from Jenkinson's tempos on previous albums, the slow tempos are, generally, a departure from his previous sound. There are plenty of exceptions to these constructs also. “303 Scopem Hard” is in an uptempo “acid” style (as the name would suggest to those in the know), although, it does have a consistent backbeat to it (unlike, say, “Go! Spastic” from Go Plastic which is stylistically similar, but with continuous variation in the drums). The consistent use of the backbeat on this album is a departure from Jenkinson's previous programmed music, but not from his recent output (which is largely instrumental). The sonic nature of the drums has changed to the more modern techniques as well. On the tracks “The Metallurgist” and “Dark Steering” the synthesizer lines are obviously side-chained to the kick drum, ducking the synthesizers out every time the kick hits.

These techniques may sound like minor technical details, but they have a very obvious role to play in the psychology of listeners. They let the listener know that the kick drum is the most important element of the song, a nearly ubiquitous feature of electronic dance music. This is a departure for an IDM artist: to come to the table with something that is so prominently dance oriented. IDM has usually been seen as approaching dance from the opposite direction: something that was a possibility, but not compulsory or crucial to the aesthetic of the music because the artists are working with dance elements to create more “experimental” structures. Autechre, Aphex Twin, and Squarepusher have consistently approached dance music with new modes of composition that generally weaken the dance element, whether on purpose or inadvertently, in servitude of more experimental techniques. The utilization of these modern mixing techniques shows that Jenkinson is more directly confronting the dance question that has contributed much ambiguity to IDM's identity in the past.

Stylistic Movement and Stasis:

Although Jenkinson has toned down the percussion's rhythmic density on this album, it still is not as overtly simplistic like much of today's popular electronic dance music is. There are some serious rhythmic outbursts, specifically in the later half of “Drax 2.” At the end of this track, all of the elements of the texture are recombined (a sort of textural recapitulation, if you will), making huge, scattered textures that sound like they could just devolve into pure noise at any moment. The rhythmic density in the drums is increased with the addition of a breakbeat, while the bass-line becomes more frantic frantic, dense, and heavily modulated, and appears in multiple virtual reverberations around the outbursts of noise. Besides the fat, deep kick drum, this is classic Squarepusher. This section feels like “Greenways Trajectory” from his 2001 album Go Plastic, with one glaring difference. The texture of “Greenways Trajectory” moves so rapidly that you find yourself in an alternate music universe: a dancehall version of “moment time.” What keeps this from happening on “Drax 2” is the massive kick drum. The persistence of the long kick drum from beginning to end of the track gives a solid metric orientation, which is not necessarily present in older Squarepusher albums. In his older albums, Jenkinson never went out of his way to make the kick drum hold so much power. It may appear at downbeats in his older works, but it never appeared, sonically, as a focal point of the mix to the extent that it would cut through all of the other elements to reorient the listener's sense of downbeat.

Jenkinson's move toward this sound is symptomatic of what seems to be a change in the role of percussion for him. Where drums were often as much of an important melodic statement as any of the other elements, they are now in a role of support. Over the last seven years or so Squarepusher albums have steadily moved in this direction, but have each had much different overall tones to them, have focused more on acoustic instruments, and have much more invested in their harmonic and melodic content than anything else. Active, dense percussive structures have simply not been a stylistic focus on these albums, and with Ufabulum this trend continues, even though the approach to this album is dramatically different overall.

Jenkinson's work has always included the option to use both electronic and acoustic instruments, but often presents them with a separation between the two (most starkly on “Time Borb” from Selection Sixteen). On Ufabulum, there is nothing but electronic sources, something that immediately snaps the listener back to his 2001 album Go Plastic because the techniques used on the albums are similar. The urge to compare the two albums is irresistible, as proven in how many times Go Plastic has come up here. The more important similarity though, is Ufabulum's simultaneous similarity to classic Squarepusher paired with its similarity to contemporary popular electronic dance music.

The huge synthesizers in Ufabulum show the same kind of attention to timbral modulation and movement that current popular electronic music does. Use of frequency modulation (FM) synthesizers, granular synthesis, and various digital effects, in a way that change the timbre of a single instrument over timespans of a bar or phrase is one of the cornerstones of current electronic music trends. The kind of chaotic, choppy, and harsh synthesizer that opens the track “Dark Steering” is a perfect example of current thought about timbre in popular electronic music. That is really the most astounding thing about Ufabulum, that it fits in with the current trend, but also points the listener back to classic Squarepusher albums, illuminating how far ahead of his time Jenkinson has been. All of the tracks on Go Plastic have these same techniques in play to varying degrees.

Another element that appears in abundance on both classic Squarepusher and Ufabulum is the “acid” bass-lines. The bass-lines throughout the album are the most intricate part of each track's texture. The lack of rhythmic density in the percussive elements does not jump out at the listener, because the bass is still as active as on any Squarepusher album. This construction draws attention to the lack of bass-lines in popular electronic music. (Even though the “wobble bass” synthesis technique permeates much of what is going on in that sphere of influence, it has nearly nothing to do with bass, but rather what happens when one automates different parameters of a frequency modulated bass signal, rendering most of the interest to how the upper harmonic profile, the timbre, changes). Jenkinson uses the bass as the one of the main melodic and rhythmic focus throughout the album, which is “typical” for him, and is a long standing compositional technique of his. These bass-lines are highly processed and modulated at times, constantly changing their timbre from moment to moment.

Ufabulum reflects how much the electronic music world has been playing catch-up with more “experimental” artists over the past two decades. Now that FM synthesis with heavy modulation and digital effects is in vogue, this album could function as a new entryway for new electronic music fans to discover Squarepusher albums that they would have never attempted to listen to before. Since Jenkinson's music has been labeled IDM (and all of the phrasal baggage that goes along with it: experimental, avant garde, etc.) some potential listeners were bound to be put off just because the “IDM culture” seems inaccessible or pretentious (that is, if IDM's reputation is as bad as people have made it out to be for the past twenty years). This album could be a great chance for newcomers to electronic music to experience what they have missed out on in the place where the current “norm” was born.