Squarepusher – Shobaleader One: d’Demonstrator

Tom Jenkinson, a.k.a.Squarepusher, has long made inaccessible music. He has also made commercially successful music (by IDM standards atleast). Often, his commercially successful music has also been his inaccessible music. This makes him something of an anomaly. And now he has formed an anomalous band featuring him, and some other people whose identities have not been revealed.

The anomalous band have an anomalous name: ‘Shobaleader One’. And they make anomalous music. Perhaps what is most anomalous about their music, by Squarepusher standards, is how regressive or even ‘retro’ it is. For much of the nineties Squarepusher, along with fellow Warp labelmates such as Aphex Twin, Autechre and Luke Vibert, were the epitome of cool. They were the future of electronic music. Their synths were so pure, their drums so delicate and abstractely programmed, the overall feel of their music so inorganic that there appeared to be an invisible barrier separating them from useless old carbon-based lifeforms making conventional music.

Yet here we are, a decade later, and Tom Jenkinson’s has formed a band composed (presumably) entirely of human beings. Not only that but Shobaleader One’s songs could quite easily be replicated live by human beings playing instruments without any great loss in production values. There are organ parts, and incessant funky bass parts, and rather intense and retro guitar parts, and even the drums sound like they might have been generated by human flesh rather than programmed. Gone is the inhuman chicanery of grossly accelerated drum loops and squeaky alien vocals.

Shobaleader One’s debut album, d’Demonstrator, begins with downtempo slow jam ‘Plug Me In’ which is perhaps what Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak would have sounded like if he’d got Daft Punk to do all the work for him. The Daft Punk influence is not limited to vocoded vocals and highly filtered guitar, in promotional videos Shobaleader go so far as to appear with some rather fetching robot helmets. d’Demonstratorends with ‘Maximum Planck’, a claustrophobic death march which is strangely reminiscent to the industrial soundtracks to early-90’s shoot’em ups like Quake and Doom. In between Kanye and Quake,d’Demonstrator borrows from Crystal Castles, and Hefty Records stalwarts such as Elliot Lipp. Perhaps the biggest influence, though, is Black Devil Disco Club, penultimate track ‘Cryptic Motion’ in particular is a greasy little disco number that would not sound out of place on 28 After, and it is by no means the only track on the album with something of a disco swagger.

The overall amalgamation of these dance influences, old and new, is something of a dystopian vision akin to the sound of a nightclub from a trashy sci-fi novel. Where the organ leads songs, such as on ‘Plug Me In’ and ‘Cryptic Motion’, Shobaleader One can be rather fun. But on tracks such as ‘Megazine’ and ‘Laser Rock’ the dominance of the guitars becomes abrasive.

We’re a long way from the Warp of the 90’s, no longer Surfing on Sine Waves, but rather Dancing Awkwardly to Sawtooths. God only knows what the target audience is for this perplexing record, but if anyone can find them it is Squarepusher.