Squarepusher - Be Up a Hello (Warp) 2

Squarepusher – Be Up a Hello (Warp)

Be Up a Hello, the first Squarepusher LP since 2015’s Damogen Furies, is an elegy of sorts and an affirmation. Talking to The Quietus recently, Tom Jenkinson revealed that the record was made in the period following the unexpected death of one of his oldest friends, an event that left him so devastated he needed to make something completely instinctive, something he didn’t need to think about. He’d also broken his wrist, so his ability to continue as a musican (he’s a fucking great bassist) was in question. So where Damogen Furies saw him writing his own software, Be Up a Hello, with his past and his future in doubt, finds our hero getting out the array of analogue drum machines and synthesisers he used to create such freakish monsters as 1997’s Big Loada EP, with its seminal, hyper-bass thrill-ride, ‘Come On My Selector’.

The opening tracks, ‘Oberlove’ and ‘Hitsonu’ are two of the most remarkable expressions of pleasure and happiness. Luridly coloured 8-bit fanfares, they’re almost painfully joyful, evocative of some grinning avatar leaping from platform to platform, munching on magic coins and fruit, and solving elaborate puzzles in a brightly lit, surreal landscape. Most art tends to ignore video games and acts as though they aren’t the single most popular and important form of mass entertainment in the world. And where gaming is engaged with, it’s usually in some reactionary, disapproving way. Not the case here. He’s found a rather touching musical language to articulate this loss – a crazy labyrinth of adventure, of never-ending death and rebirth.

Just when ‘Hitsonu’ can’t get any more insufferably, poisonously sweet, it runs into a set of minor chords that might signal a boss fight, and we’re ushered into ‘Nervelevers’, a series of urgent motifs rapidly pealing around the central riff. It’s the first of many tracks that make an excellent case for getting off your arse and doing something, anything to affirm your existence. Dance, run around, jump up and down, CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER, just get moving.

Because this is about the most dance-floor friendly music that Squarepusher has ever put out. Don’t get me wrong. These aren’t gonna get the wedding disco started any time soon. But ‘Terminal Slam’ and ‘Speedcrank’ both stay just this side of being something that you’d only need two feet and single, mammalian central nervous system to comprehend. It’s very recognisably Squarepusher, but there’s never the feeling you sometimes used to get that he’s deliberately trying to wind his audience up. ‘Mekrev Bass’ ups the ante. Dark, hyper-active, bustling with syncopated beats and fills, lashed together with grody, crunching bleeps and squalls of feedback, it sounds like someone throwing Aphex Twin down the stairs.

There’s also ‘Detroit People Mover’, which seems calculated to trick reviewers into mentioning Blade Runner. I’m not gonna fall for that though. Seems like it was only last year that Roy Batty and his rag-tag group of loveable cyborgs took on the might of the Tyrell Corporation. Keep up, Jenkinson. Joking aside, Squarepusher knows his audience. ‘Detroit People Mover’ is a lovely track. Lush and contemplative, if not quite futuristic anymore, it opens up a whole world of memory, certainly for me. Teenage me watched that film over and over with a particular friend of mine who died a few years ago. So a theme that was written in 1982 to capture an atmosphere of futuristic nostalgia in a fictional 2019, is now, for me, in 2020, literally nostalgic. Lost futures abound.

It’s also a neat set up for the meatier ‘Vortrak’. Pared-back and self-contained, like someone burning with something they can’t express. I’ve never quite heard Squarepusher like this. Is he checking himself? Does someone with such a gift of the musical gab have something he can’t quite tell us? It becomes very moving.

We’re all getting old. Be Up a Hello is a compelling response to grief and self-doubt, an exercise in pure fucking resilience. Squarepusher’s music always felt like something alive, rather than something someone had made. Something sprawling and fractal, like a madly profuse coral or insect colony. It’s an endlessly fascinating mixture of the nimble and the clumsy, but never overwhelmed by its complexity. Just last week I was asking in another context just how much of an exercise in nostalgia we should be prepared to countenance. In the case of Be Up a Hello, the answer is clear. We should be prepared to countenance quite a lot of nostalgia indeed. It’s a triumph.

God is in the TV is an online music and culture fanzine founded in Cardiff by the editor Bill Cummings in 2003. GIITTV Bill has developed the site with the aid of a team of sub-editors and writers from across Britain, covering a wide range of music from unsigned and independent artists to major releases.