Shobaleader One: Elektrac

Rating: ★★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Company Laser/Adam Betts (d)
Arg Nution/Chris Montague (g)
Strobe Nazard/Dan Nichols (ky)
Squarepusher/Tom Jenkinson (six-string el b)

Label:

Warp

May/2017

RecordDate:

8 May 2016

Do you know Squarepusher? This is a question anyone who's followed the mercurial multi-instrumentalist, aka Tom Jenkinson, for the last two decades must have asked themselves with some regularity. Blazing his own trail as a pioneer of drum'n'bass and jungle in the mid-1990s, Jenkinson's barely concealed virtuosity on the bass guitar has fought tooth and nail with his equally prodigious skills deep inside the computer music matrix. By hand-coding his own software synths and some of the most furiously intense breakbeats ever his work is notable for its contrasts, but also his personal quest to push himself to his limits. Reaching a zenith of this process with his face-melting, if uncomfortably visceral 2015 album, Damogen Furies (a counter-blast against electronic music's commodification) the only logical next step was to ditch the electronics and go totally live. A studio version of Shobaleader One emerged in 2009, but its live incarnation now sports a trio of likeminded jazz musicians who inject all previously-sequenced parts with a manic virtuosity. Jenkinson's full-throttle bass work is given free reign too, across 64 minutes of adrenalin-soaked, beat-driven proggy electronica. If early 1990s cuts such as ‘Coopers World’ and ‘Squarepusher Theme’ still sound fresh played live and direct, then it's the white-hot blast of febrile energy supplied by the jackhammer drums of Laser/Betts, which adds an aptly unhinged intensity. Yet it's the raw punkish attitude that pushes the likes of ‘Austromm Feck 4’ and Jenkinson's jazzy call-to-arms, ‘Don't Go Plastic’, well and truly into the realms of the organically interactive.

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