For something so intuitive, slap bass is a much-maligned technique. The combination of percussive attack and the metallic clack a string makes when hitting a pickup on the thump or the neck on the downward action from the pop is either immediately arresting or it conjures ‘90s sitcom themes. But there’s a lineage of musicians who have pushed past the cliché. I won’t presume that I know them all, but a shortlist might be: Marcus Miller, Larry Graham, Victor Wooten, Les Claypool, Flea, Thundercat, and Squarepusher. It’s worth noting that pretty much all of these musicians come from a genealogy of funk and jazz. Depending on what you think about Tom Jenkinson, all of them do.
Squarepusher—Tom Jenkinson—was born at precisely the right time to learn all sorts of fascinating musical approaches. I don’t know how he figured out how to play slap bass, but I would presume he was self-taught, in the same way he taught himself drums and synthesis and mixing. His first records involved mashing up sampled breakbeats and his virtuosic bass technique with cheap synthesizers made by Roland like the SH-01 or TB-303. In a world before digital audio workstations became the default, and allowed you to visually structure the music you made, Tom did it all by feel and proper pacing. Eventually the landscape would evolve. The distillation of this musical approach, the fast acid synthesizers and drum-and-bass beats, became muzak to the PSX generation. This is the kind of music that played in the background of low-res polygon games like WipEout or Gran Turismo. These were games that I played contemporaneously, as I was attempting to learn slap bass by following my favorite Chili Peppers songs in my friend’s dad’s pottery studio.
There is so much range in the compositional and timbral choices of Ultravisitor that it could be read as an avant-garde compilation. There are live tracks mixed in with studio experimentation, remixes and soundscapes. And this version of the record, the anniversary edition, includes an EP from the same period of time that wasn’t as widely released—it’s bundled together into the same packaging so there’s variant-after-variant to draw on. Pieces like “Andrei” sound like Bach chorales on classical guitar, but an octave down; segments of “Steinbolt” could easily be a bitcrushed b-side from Metallica’s Ride the Lightning; “Telluric Piece” is essentially a Jaco Pastorius solo between Weather Report numbers. And an interlude like “C-Town Smash” is what brought us to this point in the first place: slap bass all over the place.
But the highlight for me is “Iambic 9 Poetry.” Like Victor Wooten’s “Amazing Grace,” it treats the bass as a melodic instrument first, building from arpeggiated pinch harmonics into a mid-tempo duet between bass and breakbeat drums. Arranged differently, maybe with sax or keys, it could pass easily as a modern standard. Maybe, outside the variety, that’s the true pleasure of Ultravisitor: we are able to travel to so many different parts of Tom’s musical imagination, see cliché decontextualized and reapplied in such a way to make it seem entirely novel.
Verdict: Keep
Where did you last push a square?
I couldn't find this album, but started listening to Squarepusher. Thanks for the rec!
tom did it all by feel, then that sound became background music for the psx generation. something deliberate ends up as the part of a game you barely notice.