Last month, I conducted an e-mail interview with Squarepusher's Tom Jenkinson for another magazine. I sent him roughly 20 questions, and he responded with a small novella's worth of answers. Among them were his labyrinthine meditations on musicianship, materialism, situationism, and the work of "anti-psychiatrist" R.D. Laing, all of it eventually somehow tying back to Hello Everything, his 11th studio album. Ultimately, though, the biggest revelation to be had from his sprawling, 14-page reply wasn't that the usually tight-lipped Jenkinson secretly fancied himself IDM's Jesse Jackson, but rather the presence of words printed near the top of the page: Pet Sounds.
Yup-- turns out not even your garden variety, musique concrète-listening, borderline reclusive, six-string bass virtuoso-cum-electronic godhead is impervious to the Beach Boys' charms. In the interview, Jenkinson even goes so far as to quote the album's liner notes-- specifically, the bit about Brian Wilson wanting to make melodies that made the listener feel loved. While that sentiment, believe it or not, is a recurring part of his mandate here, Hello Everything is still light years away from pop music-- and millions of light years away from the commercial realm. It is, instead, a deep breath of a record, one on which Jenkinson isn't preoccupied with pulling new contorted shapes in order to maintain his discography's twisting trajectory, but rather with finding comfort in familiar genre exercises, simplicity, and melody. In other words: It's uncharacteristically cordial.
It is also, in a weird and roundabout way, kind of a parallel universe Best of. Whether in the analog sounds of plinky opener "Hello Meow" (which might have been cribbed from Go Plastic), the hyperattenuated, pitched-up breakbeat of "The Modern Bass Guitar" (Big Loada), or the spacious, unfurling percussions and classical guitars of "Circlewave 2" (Ultravisitor), nearly every single thing here feels descended from some previous Squarepusher record. Normally, we scowl when records feel like patchwork collections of previous ideas, but in the context of an artist who's pretty much made a different kind of record every year for the past decade, Hello Everything offers a welcome cooldown period, an opportunity to revisit all those previous song forms and see how they work in conjunction with tighter, friendlier melodies.
Not surprisingly, some of the album's most memorable tracks are the ones that allow Jenkinson to flex his breakcore muscle; of those, the six-minute drill'n'bloop workout "Planetarium" is easily the highlight. Elsewhere, he runs rampant. On "Bubble Life", he hones the sprawling electro jazzfunk workouts so maligned on the underrated Ultravisitor into something more concise and pop-feeling; the eerie drone piece "Vacuum Garden" consists entirely of variously pitched sine waves; and the eleven-minute long closer "Orient Orange" marries clattering percussion sounds with yawning synths. The sheer size of Hello Everything's scope dictates it's a bit of a sprawling beast, more a collection of moments than a cohesive record. Nonetheless, it's a consistently enthralling listen, and proof that even when he tries to sit still, Jenkinson is never short on inspiration.
