A 2003 US summer tour sold out on the strength of word of mouth, followed by a similarly frenzied UK week of shows. The Neptunes nominated his 2002 live album (with bonus EP) Do You Know Squarepusher for the Shortlist Prize (the US equivalent of the Mercury Prize). Sofia Coppola selected his music for the soundtrack of her film Lost In Translation. Seminal video director Chris Cunningham (whose work has recently been compiled on a DVD retrospective in conjunction with Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry) has been painstakingly working on a film based around Squarepusher's music. Radiohead's Thom Yorke will tell anyone within earshot how much he admires the Pusher man's sound. And Outkast's Andre 3000 cannot stop talking about him.
"Squarepusher's the shit," Andre told Q magazine. "I like anything by Squarepusher - I never heard anything remotely like that stuff and I love him," he added in Word magazine. "It's coming from so far out that you can't even imagine what he's thinking. There are two people who really humble me and blow my mind, and it's him and Aphex Twin - get Feed Me Weird Things by Squarepusher. I wish I could make an album that sounds like those guys..."
Suffice to say, Squarepusher's ninth album Ultravisitor has just upped the ante. He's been raising the bar since his first tracks made as a teenager for the Spymania label, perpetually on mission to capture delirious energy and uninhibited passion in sounds like you'd never heard before. The classic debut Feed Me Weird Things on RePHLEX IN 1996 PAVED THE WAY FOR defining the sound of the drum 'n' bass dancefloor, drawing on acid, neural funk, the physical intensity of hardcore rave and breakbeat, his love of jazz drummers, a flirtation with 2-step garage on the underground hit 'My Red Hot Car' and a tender side that showed in his stunning ability with melody - not to mention a heartWRENCHINGly faithful cover of Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' on Do You Know Squarepusher. In December 2003, Darren Johnston, an acclaimed British choreographer, video artist and sound designer, performed a new piece at London's South Bank Centre to a soundtrack of unreleased Squarepusher music. Inimitable in his quest to map new borders of sound and feel, with Ultravisitor, Tom Jenkinson has just delivered the album of his life that will have even his peers wondering where to turn next.
Completely unaware of the storm of critical opinion gathering pace in his wake, Tom Jenkinson has been closeted in his suburban Chelmsford house like the true eccentric maverick that he is, making extraordinary music and wrestling with ideas.
From his perspective, his challenge is to find the point of tension between his two loves - his all-time passion, playing bass and the drums - alongside the satisfying mental absorption he finds in programming and sequencing on a computer. To hold these two divergent ideas in his mind at the same time, and imagine music that redefines emotional intensity and explodes restrictive genre boundaries of musical language.
