My Favourite Squarepusher Album

There's some strong contenders, but right now, after having a Squarepusher-heavy week, I'd have to say it's Hello Everything. 

It's his most consistently brilliant release - still full of invention, but with some of the rough edges smoothed and much of the jazz experimentation reigned in and focussed into some great tunes. Even then, there's still time for the very wonderfully daft "try every sound" insanity that is The Modern Bass Guitar.

Hello (Not Quite) Everything by Squarepusher

Inspired by the Shobaleader One gig last Friday, I've been listening to all of this over the last week. That's a LOT of beats, even if there are some gaps in my collection.

Some of this I've not listened to for a long long time, but it's refreshing how well the majority of it still holds up.

Shobaleader One at Gorilla. 6 May 2016

Intense.

2012 Re-View

So here it is - the best music things of 2012.

Best song:
PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING - Spitfire

Of course.
I've already raved about this - it's one of those rare songs that I can listen to on repeat. Six months on, I still get a buzz whenever I hear the intro.

Best song title:
Scott Walker - SDSS141E+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)
Clocking in at just shy of 22 minutes, the track almost outdoes the title when it comes to incomprehensibility. Sublime, ridiculous, pretentious, hilarious, impenetrable but totally compelling. Not quite "Make It Easy On Yourself" then.

Best album:

Field Music - Plumb

Or is it Dexys - One Day I'm Going To Soar?
Or maybe The 2 Bears' Be Strong?
Both strong contenders, but I'll go for Field Music - because of it's brevity, I can listen to it repeatedly SO many more times.

A great "alternative rock" album:
Dirty Projectors - Swing Lo Magellan
What I love about Dirty Projectors is how essential everything is. Every sound, note, hit of a snare drum, have a purpose, each adding something unique - there's nothing superfluous here and no generic guitars strumming with a bass playing the root note. Oh, and the songs are pretty good too, which helps.

A great "alternative electronic rock" album:
Fuxa - Electric Sound of Summer
A Christmas present, so there's still plenty to discover with this as I've only had it for just over a week. Post/space rock and electronica, featuring three brilliant cover versions - Our Lips are Sealed, Some Things Last a Long Time and Cheree (which they have stretched out to 10 minutes). In fact the Suicide references stretch further than covering Cheree, with another track being named "Marty Suicide" and the sound on many tracks coming across a bit like Suicide collaborating with Lali Puna - that is if Suicide were a bit happier and enjoyed spending summer afternoons lying in a field listening to the birds singing.

Five great gigs
So much great live music. Here's five examples.
Grandaddy (Ritz)
Public Service Broadcasting (Soup Kitchen)
Pulp (Motorpoint Arena)
Dexys (Green Man Festival)
tUnE-yArDs (Green Man Festival)

Some great album covers:

Three Ambient Records:

It was quite refreshing to find the man who is to blame/thank for the whole genre showing the kids how it should be done. Brian Eno's Lux is one of the most beautiful things he's released in a long time. It sounds even more special now I have it on "180g DMM mastered double vinyl". Honest.

Daniel Lopatin is steadily becoming one of my favourite 21st century artists, with three brilliant albums released over the last couple of years. After Ford and Lopatin's homage to the 80s (1980s and 2080s) that was Channel Pressure, and Oneohtrix Point Never's sublime Replica, we now get a collaboration with Tim Hecker on the Instrumental Tourist album, which might be called ambient, but a thoroughly modern and forward thinking ambient.

Oh and Julian Cope released Woden, which was originally recorded in 1998 but left in the vault. He describes it as "one 72-minute ambulent meditation upon Warden Hill & Avebury". After a difficult opening section, it transforms into a beautiful and absorbing three-note melody accompanied by the distant sound of church bells. Or is it the sound of distant church bells?

Drone Pop:
I'm talking about Circles by Moon Duo, a Wooden Shjips side project (for one member anyway) that takes the sound of Wooden Shjips / Spaceman 3 and blends it with tunes that border on pop. Fantastic stuff.

And talking of side projects...
Tame Impala or Pond? Well, they both released great albums, with TI getting (most of) the accolades. Lonerism was the more consistent, but Beard, Wives, Denim contained Moth Wings - a psych rock masterpiece. A tough one to call.

Hot Chip or The 2 Bears?
Both will put a massive grin on your face. In Our Heads sounds like Hot Chip (understandably), whilst Be Strong is the perfect soundtrack for anyone pining for some post-house, Ian Dury-esque pop...and anyone who is in need of a Bear Hug.

Reissue of the year:

In agreement with 99% of all music publications, it has to be Can's The Lost Tapes. Archive material from 1968-1977 and previously unreleased, this is probably the most remarkable thing I've heard in years. So good, in fact, that I bought it twice.

Oh, how they spoil us:
After a six year gap, Mouse on Mars return with not one, but two shiny new albums of their unique glitchy electronica in a collision with techno, krautrock and hip-hop. One for the head (Parastophics) that you can dance to, which took years to complete, and one for the feet (Wow) that you can admire for it's cleverness, which was thrown together over a few months. Both great.

Best Format:
Barry Adamson - Brighton Rockers. Released as a playable postcard. That's right, a postcard that you can play.

And here's some more albums I've loved this year:

Barry Adamson - I Will Set You Free
Spritualized - Sweet Heart, Sweet Light
Euros Childs - Summer Special
Neil Young - Psychedelic Pill
Pye Corner Audio - Sleep Games
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Hallelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
Four Tet - Pink
Daphni - Jiaolong
Toy - Toy
Squarepusher - Ufabulum
The Flaming Lips With Heady Fwends

Anyway, you get the point...

Squarepusher - Ufabulum

The new Squarepusher album sounds a lot like, umm, err, Squarepusher.

Well, what did you expect?

Okay, to be more explicit - gone (or toned down at least) is the fusion sound of Just a Souvenir and the Daft-Punk-Go-R'n'B of the Shobaleader One album, and for those who often felt that some Squarepusher tracks were "a bit much", you'll be reassured to know that the kitchen sink approach (see the brilliantly bonkers "The Modern Bass Guitar" from 2006's Hello Everything) has been toned down...a bit. Even his bass guitar has taken a back seat for now.

What you get instead is the sound of classic Squarepusher - rich but complex rhythms and melodies, and frequent use of highly synth-etic orchestral sounds that he loves so much. It's also remarkably accessible (for him). There's not much point in me doing a track by track review, but I will say that right now I'm listening to Dark Steering, which manages to be funky, heavy as hell and playful at the same time.

The artwork and packaging is another Warp records masterpiece. Two discs in individual sleeves, a CD EP and a 12" booklet of photos, which are all finished off with a nice high gloss - you know, the type that immediately shows up ALL your fingerprints when you touch it.

Best of all the box that holds it all together, which printed phosphorescent ink so it goes from looking like this during the day...

To something like this at night...

If I had a better camera / grasp of Photoshop, then this would look even more impressive, but you'll just have to go out and buy the album instead...

Green Man Festival 2011

So, I've finally motivated myself enough to put a few badly written words together about this year's festival; the sunniest one in the five years I've been going.

Despite the main stage headliners being slightly underwhelming this year, there was still plenty of excellent stuff to see/hear/do and plenty of great stuff that I missed.

Here's some of my highlights that I did catch, based on the rough notes I'd scribbled on my phone whilst watching bands.

Holy Fuck (or Holy Cow as they are known in our child-friendly house), headlining the Far Out tent on Friday night, played their usual blistering set of noise funk, whist the front two members were constantly re-patching their instruments as if they'd forgot to bring enough audio cables with them.

Y Niwl, "the Welsh Shadows", at the Green Man pub, put together a 40 minute set of 60s garage rock and surf music, which everyone from Black Francis to Quentin Tarrantino knows is arguably the coolest sound known to rock. Giving each song a number rather than a title (their set taught me the numbers from 1 to 20 in Welsh) is a nice way of avoiding over-pretentious titles for instrumentals too.

And here they are playing Undegpedwar (that's Fourteen in English)..

Laura J Martin deserves a special mention, purely for bringing Chaka Demus and Pliers back to the masses with her kooky ambient folk cover of Tease Me.

Destroyer were a strange choice to headline the Far Out tent on the Saturday night, which showed in the rather thin crowd who watched them. Nonetheless, after a shaky start, where the band seemed strangely detached from the mid paced music they were playing, a stunning version of Suicide Demo for Kara Walker saw them shift into another gear as the second half of the set took on a...err..distinctly balearic feel.

After that I caught the first few songs of Fleet Foxes' headline set on the Main Stage - now I love their albums and, yes, their harmonies are beautiful, but live they left me a bit cold. Maybe it's just that Saturday night isn't the right time for their music (they're more a mid afternoon in the sun kind of band), so I left early; as did a few others who I bumped into during another jaw-dropping set from Squarepusher, who was kicking off 4 hours of "after dark" music courtesy of Warp records. One hour of Tom Jenkinson on bass and FX pedals with a live drummer, creating sounds you can barely imagine and a set of tunes that it was impossible to dance out of time to (trust me, I tried). Nice touch with the futuristic microphone headpiece too. There's no footage of him from the festival online yet, but here's an feature and interview with him from the Culture Show in 2006...possibly the greatest living bass guitarist?

Sunday daytime was all about James Blake's mid afternoon set, played to a packed crowd on the main stage, with the loudest valley-shaking bass I've heard in a long time. Anyone unconvinced by his debut album really needs to catch him live. Seems like a lovely guy too.

To finish the weekend off in style, Suuns seem to have found a winning formula of brooding electro and dirty rock, before "national treasure" Gruff Rhys' set sent us all packing with a smile on our faces. Because that's what he can't help but do...