Bleep

Whether composing Music For Robots with 78 fingers, performing with Shobaleader One, or exacting the drum and bass carnage his three decade career is prized for, Tom Jenkinson presents exhilarating experiments in a stoic yet playful manner. But as with any album bearing the “Made In Lockdown” tag, it's hard not to attribute emotionality to the latest Squarepusher offering, Dostrotime. Free from the schedule of his cancelled Be Up A Hello tour and the squall of human activity, Jenkinson spent the following 2020 in the studio brewing up some of his most intense material yet.

As the electronic scene trends towards the ever more layered and visceral, Dostrotime switches between maximalist overload and considered minimalism. Timestretched and shrunk acid breaks reflect an amorphous temporal experience, Bookmarked by explorative ‘Arkteon’ guitar passages, the album paints an ultra elastic picture: solemnly serene harmonic touchstones give way to industrial noise surges, bulldozing and buzzsawing melodic whirls into smithereens.

That rising and falling action plays out through an expertly sequenced tracklist: ‘Enbounce’ reveals itself to be a slowburning rager, with icily paced organs and ticks accelerating endlessly towards gutted trance growls, thrusted into the haywire electricity of ‘Wendorlan’ with reverb-thrown ruckus. Corrugated junglism and moody techno for a deserted Detroit flow down to the aqueous ‘Arkteon 2’, moving from placid pastoral to fraught uncertainty with each chord change, before catapulting up to the epic breakbeat balladry of ‘Holorform’ where cataclysmic rhythms occupy irradiated space. Gated incisions and caustic synths span the steely and foreboding ‘Akkranen’, while ‘Heliobat’ is the calm after the storm, skipping slackened strums and spare drums along the water.

Thirty years in, Squarepusher unleashes one of his most cinematic, dextrous, and gargantuan records to date.