Squarepusher - Ufabulum

Album number fourteen, under the Squarepusher moniker alone, from Tom Jenkinson is, within the terms of his own sound, quite poppy and summery. At times it veers very close to Orbital’s recent Wonky – the old guard appear in 2012 to be in a playful mood. Constructed entirely from programmed sound with no live elements at all, the impenetrably-titled work has a visual sequence associated with each of the ten tracks, making its live performance an integrated show of sound and visual elements (at least that’s the theory apparently). With that in mind UFA may be in reference to the Weimar era film studio, or not, whilst a fabulum is a species of shellfish.

From the opening of Track 1, ‘4001’, this is then a pretty uplifting collection.  The beats and parps hammer away at you throughout but interlaced with those are jaunty little higher register trills and melodies redolent of nursery rhymes or kids tinkering on miniature pianos in a playgroup. ‘Unreal Square’, for example, is quite 8-bit in character behind the clattering drum sounds. The child-like element returns on ‘Energy Wizard’ (a track about which Jenkinson himself is on record as having said the arpeggios within it are intended to represent “strobe flashes under a microscope” where bacteria were reproducing alarmingly).

‘The Metallurgist’ takes things into probably the darkest area visited by the album, a place of howling as if from down a well followed by brooding, damp, subterranean meanderings on ‘Drax 2’, track number seven. The sprightly nature of the earlier songs is once again evident though on the final three cuts. Managing to be both an accessible listen for the uninitiated and also keeping his head well above water, Jenkinson has here then turned in an admirable addition to his legacy.