Squarepusher

Do you feel that Ultravisitor is your best work to date...it feels like a fairly epic, very personal odyssey. Did you need to throw a hell of a lot of emotion into it...?
Ultravisitor is my spectacle of beauty and of terror. It is unknowable, and will never be understood by anybody, least of all its creator. It brings all the problematic figures to my mind that I have loved endlessly and yet remain as unknown to me as the first time I came across them (though I in no way associate my work with them, lest their reputation be affected.) Andrei, Franz, Don, Hermann, Richard, Friedrich, Sebastien, David, Tod, Augustus.

Do you have any kind've vision/plan prior to producing...it seems more like an intense, out of control stream of consciousness...?
I have only ever had one idea, and that is to be myself. That is the only thing I can do, in my work and in my life in general. That is not to say that my work is a representation of what I am. It is only a game for which I'm guessing the rules. I do not want to give myself away, so I play games instead. You see my work as personal, but it is anything but that. It has very little to do with me, and that is why it is and will remain intrueging.
Through it you will sense my shadow, but never myself. In contrast look at say Ninja Tune for example. All of their work drips with earnestness and tries to be quirky or have "personality". A radical mistake that ensures noone will care about it in the future - the exposed truth of personalities is so completely boring.

Were parts of Ultravisitor recorded on tour?
Yes, in fact most of the tracks are recorded from shows either in the UK or in the US/Canada. The point of using live versions of the tracks is that they show stupid people that, though their own stubbornness prevents them from being able to engage with my music, they hear other people cheering in the background, and realise that although this music is obscure, it cannot be totally inaccessible because other people like it. Because it is obscure, but not totally inaccessible, this makes it cool. This makes stupid people buy it. One day their children will dust it off and play it, and realise that I am the supreme musical genius of my generation. This means I'll still be able to play gigs when I'm an old fart with no ideas. Hopefully.

What do you perceive as avant-garde music today..?
There is really no such thing as a musical avant-garde, because enough people are now so ready and desperate for "difference" that nothing experimental stays on the margins. The speed at which information can be disseminated about music forces anybody with something resembling originality to be quickly brought to the zenith of their popularity. Thus their career is prematurely terminated, or more accurately, frozen. Hence the search goes on. Anything now is acceptable, such is the need for novelty. It has revealed that there was never taste, just habits. Now there are only waves of enthusiasm that break and sink into the sand, in endless procession.

Article from the March 2004 edition of Flux magazine

"Collaborating with machines" by Tom Jenkinson.

The old preconceptions of machines (ie: drum machines, samplers, software) as inhibitive to "genuine" creativity/ "soulless" etc. are now quickly evaporating. The machine facilitates creativity, yes, but a specific kind of creativity that has undermined the idea of a composer who is master of and indifferent to his tools - the machine has begun to participate. Any die-hard instumentalists that still struggle to retain their notion of human sovereignty are exemplifying a peculiarly (western) human stupidity - resistance to the inevitable. What is also clear, though certainly undesirable by any retaining an anthropocentric view of composition is that
this process proceeds regardless of any ideal point of human-machine collaboration (ie one where the human retains any degree of importance.) One might say that music is imploding in preparation for a time when there is no longer any need for it.

As is commonly percieved, the relationship between a human operator and a machine is such that the machine is a tool, an instrument of the composers desires. Implicit in this, and generally unquestioned until recently, is the sovereignty of the composer. What is now becoming clear is that the composer is as much a tool as the tool itself, or even a tool for the machine to manifest its desires. I do not mean this in the sense that machines are in possesion of a mind capable of subtly directing human behaviour, but in the sense that the attributes of the machine are just as prominent an influence in the resulting artefact as the user is; through his work, a human operator brings as much about the machine to light as he does about himself. However, this is not to say that prior to electronic mechanisation, composers were free and unfettered in their creations. As a verbal langauge facilitates and constricts our thoughts, the musical tradition, language and the factors of its realisation(ie instrumentation, limits of physical ability) were just as active participants in the compositional process as the "composer" was.

Idealists who believed such constraints were simply obstacles in the composer's way have laboured to relieve us of them, only to reveal that music is in fact contingent on the very existence of these restrictions, and was never a pre-eminent "form". The "modern" composer, robbed of his constraints, finds himself in a wasteland of desolate freedom. The inconsequentiality of new classical music serves to illustrate this point.

However, for those who don't seek eternal freedom, help is at hand. Whatever may remain of the older constraints is of little consequence as music is now in the grip of a new restriction, the machine.

The machine can be a respite from the meaninglessness of musical freedom. Yet the old tendency to try to unfetter ourselves surfaces: instead of a collaboration, the machine is put at our service. Some of us still flatter ourselves with a certain sort of delusion whereby it is solely our conscious, rational thinking that directs our creations, and is manifest in them. Trying to force a machine to manifest a conscious purpose brings about a stifling and deadening process that only in our time could pass for "creativity". It imposes that the didactic "collaboration" with a machine is a strictly one-way energy channel, from the user to the machine. In this situation, the machine cannot constitute a genuine "oppositional factor" in a dialectical equation as it offers not the antithesis of the conscious human will but rather the negation of it. When being forced to "purpose", all the machine seems to be capable of is resistance. It is not that the machine is a lifeless vacuum that continually absorbs inspiration and ideas from its user, but that the user hinders the collaboration by assuming he is the progenitor of these things in the first place. It is in this trick of perspective, from the humble "it happened" to the questionable "I made it happen" to the disastrous "I can make it happen" that lies the labarynth of paradoxes that is our "modern" world.

The problematic relationship between humans and machines stems from the abject remnants of the modernist idea that we can control our fates, perfect ourselves and our surroundings, postpone or eventually eradicate death. (Anyone who is afraid of dying needs salvation, but not as they might say, from death, but in fact from life, and of course a retreat into dogma suits this purpose very well). This view holds that anything can ultimately be made a subject of our conscious will. However, bending something to our conscious will, whether that is a person, a machine, or a situation always manifests a compensatory and contradictory aspect. Something crops up which subverts our will. Yet it is never admitted that such subvertions are simply the corollary of our obsession with conscious direction of our surroundings and thus the idiocy continues. It is in this attitude of blind hectoring that the machine user-artist limits the possibility of transcendence. In this situation, it therefore makes little sense to the user to do anything with the machine other than to try to utterly dominate it, or risk being dictated to by a sterile lump of plastic. Unfortunately, working with any material in a violent and dictatorial way simply produces artefacts of human stupidity, not art. Inevitably, the violence commited by the artist returns
to its source. This is why many artists have gone insane, died young, or commited suicide. Although they are viewed as heroic, they are simply the people who have most consistently sensed the fundamentally ambiguous nature of all action and died fundamentally not from suicide or illness, but from despair.

One might say that the western tradition simultaneously holds
anthropocentric views and yet makes scientific discoveries that continually point out that we are the center of nothing at all. (In that sense, we are all schizoid - we are all irreperably split, it is simply a matter of how you deal with it.) The use of machines has completed the abolition of anthopocentricity in a radical manner - that we are no longer even the centers of ourselves. Creativity does not seem to be an exclusively human activity anymore, but that begs the question, was it ever? Our actions may not come from our "thinking centre" that we hold dear, but rather from opaque rivers full of uncanny riches that we may have been lucky (or unlucky) enough to fall into, and strong enough to keep afloat in. (This river is only opaque in relation to the relentless "clarity" of our scientific orthodoxy.) It is clear when someone's actions come from here, all else is pattern, habit and self deception. It is only our habitual obssesion with knowledge and control that keeps us from this river, and maybe, for now, it is for the best.

It might be said that we can be possesed by ideas, inspiration, but
ultimately they escape our control and our impulse to retain them. To attempt to possess anything always brings about problems, particularly these high minded conceits, and is a poignant reaction to our dread of death, the ultimate negation of posession. We try to hide behind ideas of usefulness, the future, success, but all takes us further from the one thing we do posess - this moment.

In an era saturated with "activity" and devoid of prospects of personal transcendance, death becomes more and more imposing - no action, no transcendence, just dimensionless intangible void. This leads artists (people who admit their fear) to try to encode themselves into their work, so that the work can act as an ambassador, and ultimately as a concrete (ie: not organic) substitute for the self, and thereby escape the problem of bodily death. We hide behind our work to reveal an immortalized self. Our "creative process" is thus an attempt to simultaneously hide, and invite discovery. But as the emphasis (and significance in the creative process) slowly shifts from the human to the machine, artefacts that are more the product of machines than of human beings are put forth as immortalized ambassadors of the self. Like it or not, we are coming to be represented by machines. Thus we conclude that artists, predominantly musicians, are the first people to tacitly admit their deference to machines. Yet this is revealed in other ways elsewhere in society. We are losing our reticence to relinquish control or mediation of many aspects of everyday life lives to machines. Yet not only do we feel inferior to machines, but we are jealous of them, and thus the machine becomes the ultimate social currency: who owns the latest sports car/computer/trainers/software. It is not simply the implication of monetary superfluity that makes ownership of these things significant, it is deeper than that. It is because we have come to believe in machines, perhaps more profoundly than we believe in ourselves. Their perverse lack of self-knowledge renders them eminently more capable of transcendence. We are significant only in conjunction with machines; anyone who is technologically illiterate is becoming the modern day equivalent of a village idiot or a heretic, by way of a corresponding lack of intelligence or faith. It is actually advantageous to have simply the appearance of a musician, because the tasks of the music making can be delegated to what is eminently more trustworthy: the machine. The last attempt to retain human sovereignty over machines is to don them as a fashion accessory, symptomatic of a moronic cultural environment saturated with sloganeering and "attitude", synonomous with the commodity oriented marketing strategies that underpin it, empty as the thinking behind it.

Op dinsdag 9 maart 2004 19:08 schreef Weakling het volgende:
*knip*

Aanrader voor elke Squarepusher liefhebber denk ik zo, tenzij je alleen van de "Big Loada" Squarepusher houdt, dan valt deze CD je misschien tegen door de relatieve rust. Iemand anders die Ultravisitor al beluisterd heeft? Zo ja, wat vond je er van?

Op maandag 5 april 2004 23:01 schreef jaap393 het volgende:
http://www.tinck.be/index.cfm/act/show/event/8643

Op maandag 5 april 2004 20:08 schreef TheArowana het volgende:
Ik heb 'm pas aangeraden gekregen van iemand (die volgens mij hier ook op het forum zit ?) en ik moet zeggen, het is geniaal.. Helaas heeft kazaa een hekel aan me en is dat wederzijds.. en zo heel veel kan ik dus niet downloaden (op irc vind ik helemaal niks

).. en voor jullie gaan zeuren dat je die cd's moet kopen: waar zou ik dat moeten doen? ik woon in een stom gehucht en de dichtstbijzijnde stad (antwerpen) ligt op 50km afstand, en daar ben ik ook nog nooit op een plek geweest waar ik veel van dergelijke muziek gevonden heb (aphex twin bij wijze van hoge uitzondering, maar verder? niks hoor..)

Op dinsdag 6 april 2004 09:25 schreef Yorrit het volgende:

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klinkt interessant. maar om daar nu helemaal voor naar brugge te gaan...

Op dinsdag 6 april 2004 10:45 schreef jaap393 het volgende:

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Maar gelukkig ligt Brugge maar een uurtje treinen van Antwerpen

De aanwezigheid van Mira Calix ZEKER, Aphex Twin en Squarepusher is niet gegarandeerd.

Op maandag 14 april 2003 01:23 schreef Stonehead het volgende:
Dat was Aphex Twin. Wel warm, ongeveer hetzelfde genre vaagheid.

Mijn favoriet: Tundra.

Op donderdag 29 april 2004 20:20 schreef Thomas B. het volgende:
Het schijnt dat er in juni een show is van Aphex EN en Squarepusher in Belgie... duidelijk dat ik daar heenga

Op donderdag 29 april 2004 20:28 schreef Redux het volgende:
ja, dat linkje staat hier iets verder naar boven. 't is niet zeker dat ze komen..
http://www.tinck.be/index(...)3

Op woensdag 23 juni 2004 17:36 schreef superheist het volgende:
squarepusher staat op Reading/Leeds dus misschien lowlands/pukkelpop of ergens in nederlands *hoopt*

Op donderdag 30 november 2006 15:39 schreef docters het volgende:
Willen een avond met Squarepusher, Kilimajaro Darkjazz Ensemble (Bong-Ra +band ) plus nog een act. Iemand een idee?

Op vrijdag 1 december 2006 09:18 schreef docters het volgende:
Zal Somatic Responses eens checken. Bedankt voor de suggestie.

Squarepusher wil overigens alleen komen als hij een half uur acoustisch kan bassen, dus een enorme show met band, dj's etc zit er niet in. Vandaar ook dat ik daarnaast Kilimanjaro Darkjazz wil hebben, dat zal dan min of meer in de lijn liggen met de Jenkinson show. Overigens; check zijn website en zie hoe hij ook met alleen een bas en een laptop helemaal loos kan gaan.

Het probleem is vervolgens; hoe ga je de rest van de avond inkleden? Blijf je in de jazzy (downtempo) sfeer of ga je steeds harder naarmate de avond vordert? Ik denk zelf aan het laatste. Misschien moet ik ook eens naar de Planet-Mu dj informeren ...

Zeker niet in het SJU, want dan wordt het een economisch erg onverantwoorde avond

That's it. Geen sequencers, no nothing. Volgens zijn agent is het waycool, maar als je het zo leest dan moet ik toegeven dat het wat mager is. Maar hopelijk is de prijs er ook naar

Op vrijdag 1 december 2006 16:36 schreef docters het volgende:
Ja, ik begrijp wel wat je bedoelt en wees er gerust op dat ik dit spelletje vaker heb gespeeld ... want anders is het 2007 en ben je niets opgeschoten.

Op woensdag 6 december 2006 10:54 schreef docters het volgende:
Maar (Chris) Clark wil WEL komen ...

Op vrijdag 13 januari 2012 09:30 schreef Radioheader het volgende:

Squarepusher - Ultravisitor

Squarepusher

Is ie eigenlijk nog met iets bezig ? Had hem gezien op Lowlands 2009, was erg vet. Al m'n vrienden gingen naar de Staat, maar wilde deze baas toch graag aan het werk zien. Kende nog wat gasten die het ook wilden checken en het was het waard

Op zaterdag 26 mei 2012 14:04 schreef marcek het volgende:
Voor de liefhebbers,
5 oktober eenmalig concert in de melkweg, optreden is onderdeel van een tour gekoppeld aan het nieuwe album Ufabulum.

Squarepusher - 'Dark Steering' taken from forthcoming album 'Ufabulum' out 14th/15th May

Op vrijdag 21 september 2012 00:24 schreef DO2 het volgende:
Music Is Rotted One Note is behoorlijk jazzy, Norrage.
En behoort samen met Hard Normal Daddy ook tot een van z'n beste albums, als je 't mij vraagt.

Op vrijdag 21 september 2012 09:33 schreef Norrage het volgende:

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goede tip

Dat is gewoon bijna een Miles Davis fusion album

Op vrijdag 21 september 2012 09:59 schreef DO2 het volgende:

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Ja, heerlijk album.