Holy Fuckity Bastard It's The New Squarepusher Album (a thread about Ultravisitor)

I shall grill lamb chops to the sound of Squarepusher tonight.

(bet that kills the thread)

wasn't this the Utah Saint's trademark first?

There are any number of fake "live" songs on 50s and 60s records, with fake applause...I'm spacing, but I know Gram Parsons had one with fake applause, even fake beer bottles (or real I guess) beer bottle falling on the floor.

anyone know the file size of the true first track?

no idea if it's leaked, sorry.

I guess he's becoming (or he became a long time ago) the sort of musicians' musician. For a wanky slap bass jazzmuppet I suppose that's some sort of victory. For me it's nice that someone is doing some serious kit murder out there, even if it ain't too listenable most of the time. And I like his utter determination to piss people off:- be it Greenways Trajectory or the fact that his Love Will Tear Us Apart cover really annoyed the old-skool d'n'b heads.

hey, some of us actually like jazz-fusion!

Yep. (one of the awsome tracks samples Blackboard Jungle, got the promo upstairs and can't be arsed to look up the title, but that one is really good.)

The tracks with live drums (and hence bass & keyboards, often) work way better than everything else, not out of rockism, but because he actually has to write some music to fill up the space. The first one (Iambic 9 Poetry?) is pretty cool, great drums, but track 13 (Tetra-Sync) is fantastic. It actually GOES somewhere, and he actually mixes the cutting and processing with the live instrumentation like I wish he would have done the whole fucking album.

Basically, this just makes me want to get more old, pre-Music is Rotted Squarepusher.

The Simfonetta/Sq/Liddell gig was very good, although there was no mingling or collaboration. Ballet Mechanique was absolutely bloody wonderful, as was 6 Marimbas, if anything the orchestra blew the Warp people off the stage.

Squarepusher did a new track, extremely Clockwork-Orange-Soundtrack, and far more logical than even Tetrasync, a slow, steady build. Good stuff.

As an album it really feels like the culmination of all his work thus far. 'Do You Know Squarepusher' was definitely a prototype for some of the work presented here. (where it is more mature) Going from listening to this straight back to 'Music Is Rotted One Note' was a very interesting...

I'm impressed, but I owe it a better listen. (ie not just when I'm driving the car) I'll put it on my minidisc tonight.

It is a bit too long and I started getting bored by the end. Must check track 13 as I really miss his Hard Normal/Big Loada days.

Squarepusher delights me as much as frustrates me. His stuff almost always sounds like he nearly got there, nearly made an amazing track but somehow didn't quite do it. There's always a missing element that's hard to pin down, like a massive drum'n'bass build up and just as it's about to break out cue more jazz noodling...

Last Squarepusher gig I saw everyone was pretty much naked by the end. Cool show though, my bass playing friends were in awe the whole time, he is a fucking good bass player.

I wish I could tell when he's doing real drums and when they're programmed, he sounds like he could be a pretty good jazz drummer too.

I have to go back and listen to this, I think (see my post slightly above).

I also love this song. There's a Faust/Dalek collab CD out now that I don't think does as good a job with the menacing, industrial version of hip hop that Squarepusher does.

In summary, meh.

might be a hot take but I feel like this is the record Zappa must've thought he was making all those years. not just by putting in all the crowd noise (and perhaps doing some of it live?) but also all the sudden smash cuts and different ways he finds to test people's patience, not to mention layering what sounds like vastly different tracks on top of each other.

I know people were kinda lukewarm on it at the time but I think it's held up really well, now that it's divorced from the shadow of a dying genre. you can really hear the insane amount of work that went into this, clearly he went into this thinking magnum opus and none of his subsequent records try nearly as hard. though thats maybe a good thing. could be the most exhausting record I own.

A lot of people hold this one up as one of his best. I should definitely revisit it.

For me it was the album where I fell off the wagon. I'm not even sure I've ever listened to it all the way through. I was an avid SP fan, bought every release as it came out. But my interest in this type of music was on the wane by 2004, not helped by witnessing two catastrophically disappointing Jenkinson sets at Summer festivals around this time, both where the sound was so poor he got frustrated, shouted at the soundman, then spent the rest of his set doing unaccompanied bass solos.

I think it was mostly the crowd noises that threw me at the time. I realise now that was probably a deliberate piece of misdirection. Gonna give it a spin now.

Listening back now. I can see why I was underwhelmed but also why this one got a lot of good reviews at the time. It comes across as a "the story so far" consolidation of everything he'd been doing up to that point, from the jazzier and more experimental stuff on 'Music Is Rotted One Note' (an excellent record I wish he'd revisit), to the more electronic-led stuff on 'Go Plastic' and 'Do You Know Squarepusher'.

And while this is retreading familiar ground, the sound is a lot more vaporous and less tangible than his previous records, which all had standout moments of either stark melodic beauty ('Iambic 5 Poetry', 'My Sound') or a pop-rave banger ('Red Hot Car', 'DYK Squarepusher?', 'Cooper's World') to buoy-out the more noodly excesses. Ultravisitor, by comparison, feels like an unsequenced assortment of different styles - jazz, exeprimental, live, electronic - with little through-line or tentpole moments, presenting a Squarepushery paste rather than something I can sink my teeth into. As such, it's not disimilar to Aphex Twin's 'Druqks' album from a few years before, which also came off as a chocolate-box revue of his sound up-to-then.

My impression is that Ultravisitor is actually an attempt at a spring clean - putting things to rest before switching to a new approach on 2006's Hello Everything, which is all-the-more instant and appealing. Just a shame that Ultravisitor came out precisely when Jenkinson's critical and commercial star was at its peak. I think critics were keen to praise it through good will, having steadily gained a following through his previous records.