Event on 2012-08-02 20:00:00
KALX PresentsSquarepusher
with Eric Sharp (Rock It Science Laboratories)
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- Day: Thu, Aug 2, 2012
- Showtime: 8:00 PM
- Doors open: 7:00 PM
- Days until show: 5
- Ages: All Ages
- On sale now
- Advanced Ticket Prices*: .00-.00
- Day of Show*: .00
For Ticket Inquiries contact axs Guest Services: http://www.axs.com/san-francisco-ca/help
Squarepusher is the principal pseudonym adopted by UK-based recording artist Tom Jenkinson. His compositions draw on numerous influences including drum and bass, acid house, jazz and electroacoustic music. All his tracks are typically realised using a combination of electronic sound sources, live instrumental playing and digital signal processing. He is renowned for his electric bass playing; Flea of The Red Hot Chilli Peppers has described him as "the best electric bass player on Earth." He is highly regarded by a wide range of fellow musicians, having drawn praise from the likes of Thom Yorke, Andre 3000 and Mike Patton to name a few.
His first school was affiliated with Chelmsford Cathedral, giving him exposure to organ music which has subsequently influenced his work. When he was seven, he bought a tape-recorder for 75 pence and used it to make recordings of his father's records and radio broadcasts. He became fascinated by how various factors would affect the sound of the cassette playback, for example if the recorder was jolted, or if the batteries were running out.
Tom also performed numerous gigs as a bass player in various local bands, all whilst recording at home using his bass in combination with sequenced drum patterns and using his collection of guitar effects pedals and tape recorders in accordance with equipment borrowed from other musicians.
In August 1993 Tom recorded O'Brien and the track was liked by a friend named Hardy Finn so much so that together they raised funds to release this piece - along with additional material - on 12” vinyl with the record label they both formed entitled Nothing’s Clear.
Months later, whilst in his first year studying a BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design, Tom spent his entire student loan on musical equipment, which in 1994, for a London-based student, was £1400. This afforded him an Akai S950 sampler that would go on to feature on all of his recordings up to and including Selection Sixteen. Tom then began to pursue his fascination for integrating breakbeats into electronic music. This was partly inspired by early 1990s recordings on labels such as Shut Up And Dance, Chill and D-Zone, but also Aphex Twin's usage of breaks in tracks like Polynomia C and Dodecahedron.
Tom's first EP as Squarepusher was entitled Conumber and exhibited his influence of mid-1990s jungle. The record was released on Spymania, a label set up by Hardy and Paul Fowler. And after trawling all of the drum and bass specialist stores in London and handing out copies which received varied reactions, Rocket at Ambient Soho on Berwick Street was so enthused by Tom’s sound that they invited him to play a live set at their club night held at The George Robey pub in Finsbury Park. This meeting with Rocket subsequently resulted in two releases on the Worm Interface label.
During this period Tom compiled a remix for Ninja Tune's DJ Food, which featured on the EP Refried Food. With a five album record deal with Warp, Tom deferred his art studies – but not before spending his last student loan on a Tascam M80 ¼” 8-track recorder and a Sony DAT machine which was used to craft his debut album Feed Me Weird Things.
Soon came Tom’s first release on Warp Records entitled Port Rhombus, of which the title track started life as a remix of a Ken Ishi song commissioned by R&S Records, but was rejected for having insufficient similarity to Ken's piece.
In 1996 Tom featured in a drum and bass Dutch documentary made by V-Pro alongside Photek and Source Direct. It was filmed whilst he was making E8 Boogie and also features footage from his performance at the Big Chill festival of that year. Meanwhile, using the same equipment that produced the majority of Feed Me Weird Things, Tom began working on his first album for Warp entitled Hard Normal Daddy, the album’s concept was to “push away from the jazz influence that was being felt at the time to a more soundtrack-type of sound.”
Despite a substantial advance by Warp for his first full-length release with them, Tom’s equipment list remained the same when recording 1997’s Big Loada, with him seemingly indifferent to the trappings of money. “I never really got round to banking their cheques, let alone spending them. Several had to get re-issued because they went out of date!”
The album’s opening track, Journey To Reedham, highlights Tom’s 8-bit computer influence and the piece was even originally commissioned to be used in a computer game, but Tom decided it was too important to hand over to somebody else. The track immediately became a favourite at gigs and was still making apppearances as an encore in his run of live shows in 2009.
For his third album, Music Is Rotted One Note, Tom played all of the instruments and also engineered and produced each track. But after recording all of the basic material through his Soundcraft Spirit Folio mixer, he felt the tracks required elaboration that was beyond the scope of the 8-track / Spirit Folio set up. So, after moving to Sheffield, Tom acquired a Mackie 24-channel, 8-bus console and a Tascam MSR16 1/2" 16-track recorder.
Once Music Is Rotted One Note was completed in May 1998, Tom went to South East Asia for two months, and on this trip acquired a selection of Gamelan instruments which would later help create Budakhan Mindphone. This was the first record where Tom started using effects processors in such a way that the available parameters would all vary as the piece progressed. This period also produced the Maximum Priest EP which included Our Underwater Torch, a track partially inspired by Tom’s developing obsession for the ‘extremely complex and varied’ sounds of water.
In March 1999 Tom found himself a regular DJ at various club nights around Sheffield. “I was hearing club music all the time again and it started to feed into my musical ideas,” he says. This process had begun in earnest with the tracks Fly Street, Varkatope and Decathon Oxide, and so Tom aimed to develop that approach, along with his penchant to bring back the usage of sampled breakbeats.
In this period he was also frequenting a Manchester-based club night called Schizm which was run by friends and one night agreed to play live there with a “back to basics acid set for a laugh." Some material from this live set was subsequently recorded at Tom’s studio, which led to Schizm Track #1, Schizm Track #2, Snake Pass, Dedicated Loop and Acid Tape Track.
Early 2000 saw Tom consider “radical tactics” after realising it was time to return to sequencers and leave behind the live-playing approach which he had adopted since late 1997. Consequently the basses, drums and Gamelan were packed away and the studio was updated with sequencers, samplers and synthesizers. Tom then decided to leave Sheffield and return to London where he revisited a lot of the mid-1990s drum and bass that had inspired his early releases and also dug out old dub recordings, sound system tapes and radio recordings of reggae shows from the early 80s.
By summer 2000 the recording sessions for Go Plastic were under way and of his set-up and use of synths Tom says: “The idea was to get completely inside the machines and tear out of them the most fucked up music I could find in there. It was all about trying to make it sound totally liquid and psychedelic, like liquid LSD. I've always had a Frankenstein-thing going on, ever since I was kid who played around with electronics. I love the idea of the set-up having such a complex level of internal activity that it begins to resemble a living being.”
The album’s opening track My Red Hot Car, along with Boneville Occident, is arguably his most well-known pieces. But it’s The Exploding Psychology track which provides Tom with a pertinent memory. “I was making the last part of the song, where the organ comes in with the pulse wave melody bit, and I stopped the track and could hear my girlfriend singing that melody in the next room in a kind of sleepy trance - that really moved me.” Following the release of Go Plastic, Tom played tracks off the album during many of his ensuing gigs at Shepherds Bush Empire, the 100 club and also his first shows in America which included Coachella.
For his 2002 album Do You Know Squarepusher, the cover version of Love Will Tear Us Apart has a particular significance. “It was around this time that Rob Mitchell at Warp died. The last evening I spent with him was in Sheffield and he had been playing me some music by Joy Division. I decided to record that song as a memorial to him, but at the same time I really didn't want to divert attention from the tragedy of his death to my record so I kept the story to myself.”
The subsequent album Ultravisitor – released in 2004 - was crafted using a software-based system which enabled Tom to make music anywhere with electricity. Consequently several tracks were made at friends’ houses, on trains and in hotels. Parts of certain songs and four entire pieces were also recorded at shows in the UK and US in the summer of 2003. As such, the start of Ultravisitor features ambient sound from a show in L.A. and the outro features ambient sound from a gig at the Leadmill in Sheffield. Interestingly, given that Tom suspected Ultravisitor might be his last record, he immediately got sucked into making more music which included pieces found on the Square Window bonus CD and the Venus No.17 EP.
Tom did not disappoint with 2006’s highly acclaimed follow up to Ultravisitor, Hello Everything, an album that came together in an organic way. His approach at the time was open ended - “making stuff ad hoc without any interest in where it was heading.” Despite the laissez faire attitude to his output, the success of the album propelled him to make his first live appearance on television, performing a virtuoso bass composition on the Culture Show. It was a signal of where he was heading. It was around this time that he also performed at the stellar John Peel memorial show. After the Number’s Lucent EP created in 2006, Tom claims he had exhausted his interest in making electronic music. “At that point, I'd been working on electronic music for around 15 years. I'm just acutely aware of how limited time is and I think I'd rather spend it doing what I do best which is taking risks and making experiments.”
Following on from a series of choice live shows at arts venues around Europe, the Solo Electric Bass LP under his own name was released, marking a break with electronic music. It showcased yet another aspect of Tom’s bewildering musical range – virtuosic composition with a 6 string electric bass, serving as a stark contrast to his previous output. Tom’s performance on the bass has garnered much lauded praise because of his particular treatment of the instrument; “ I sort of try to make it a bit more punk and messy rather than like a spotless article of refinement. I thrive on contradictions and the thought of just delivering it in the manner of a classical recital was depressing to me." Tom went on to sell out the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Cité De La Musique in Paris with his Solo Electric Bass shows.
The press release for 2010’s Just a Souvenir recounts a daydream that Tom had whereby he imagined a group playing all kinds of fantasy instruments and bizarre music. Just a Souvenir thereby had become an album in which the live band experience was emulated on record singlehandedly by Tom. Take the lead track “The Coathanger” which Tom remarked "the basic elements of the track are akin to a four piece band with a drummer, a bassist and two guitar players. I started building the piece in that fashion.”
Whilst 2010’s Shobaleader One was a stylistic departure from his previous work, it was a conjoinment of different musical aspects coming together. Shobaleader One was an anonymous band of highly skilled musicians and Tom on bass & vocals. After the album was completed, Tom spent the remainder of the year establishing technical aspects of a Shobaleader One tour. And in April 2011 he played at a benefit gig for the Japanese Red Cross in the wake of the Tsunami which devastated Japan a month earlier. “By then I had only just got my own rig stage worthy. It's going to be a while before I'm totally confident about putting Shobaleader One on the road. “
In keeping with Tom’s creative contradictions, 2012’s Ufabulum sees a dramatic and triumphant return to a pure, aggressive electronic aesthetic. It has been conceived in tandem with a symbiotic visual show which is a progression of Toms’ use of audio driven software to manipulate imagery and a development of the LED helmet that appeared during the Shobaleader period.
"Music always has an imaginary visual aspect for me, ranging from evocations of simple combinations of colours, through complex geometric arrangements to real-life scenes. This project is focused on allowing visual aspects to feed back to the music that I make and vice versa, in order to bind them as closely together as I can. I've only ever seen the point of using imagery when it is completely locked, both rhythmically and conceptually, to the music."
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Event on 2012-08-02 00:00:00
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