Tom Jenkinson’s work as Squarepusher lacks any real center, instead firing off in multiple directions to dizzying effect. His best tracks are vibrant in their nutty, wild-eyed ways, such as Go Plastic's ultra-precise “My Red Hot Car”, or when they sound like a refined version of his rubbery, bass-driven puzzles (Just a Souvenir's “The Coathanger”). Sometimes, his work seems designed to provoke fatigue, with the sheer density of sound violently throwing up multiple barriers to entry, to the point where his listeners are left skirting on an infinite loop somewhere outside the process. Pitchfork’s Jess Harvell described Squarepusher’s last full-length album, Ufabulum, as having an “angry-jazz-droids-run-amok” feel—a useful summation of his sound that now reads as oddly prescient: on Music for Robots, Jenkinson hands the keys to the car to some actual droids.
This five-track EP was conceived after Jenkinson and a number of Japanese composers received an invite to develop music for a group of music-playing robots collectively named Z-Machines. The robots are programmed to play somewhere beyond the human realm—there's a guitarist with 78 fingers, and a drummer with 22 arms. Naturally, the corporate world quickly zoomed in on this phenomenon, as Coors’ alcopop offshoot Zima sponsored a rather dispiriting-looking debut show by Z-Robots in 2013. “When [the robots] see the audience raise up their bottles of Zima, they jam harder,” reads a caption in this YouTube clip.
Watching a dreadlocked robot shredding in proportion to how enthusiastic an audience is about promoting a drinks company—with its eyes lit up in a message from its sponsor, no less—may put a damper on any “New robot overlords” thoughts. But enlisting Jenkinson to see just how far out they can push the concept means that at least someone in the Z-Robots team has been dreaming creatively. Regardless, for anyone with a cursory knowledge of the Squarepusher back catalog, the results on Music for Robots are unsurprising. This is no brave new world Jenkinson is entering; instead, it sounds like he schooled a group of robots in his familiar musical motifs, dragging them down with him into the mix of jazz fusion and electronics he’s been peddling for the past 20 years.
Although Jenkinson seems like an adventurous choice to test out this type of composition, in a sense he’s not the right guy for the job. His bass playing—so fluid, so knotty, but so often a triumph of technique over feeling—already has an un-human remove to it. So when EP highlight “Sad Robot Goes Funny” enters into the realm of blur-of-fingers playing, it doesn’t feel like there’s much going on that we haven’t heard in prior Squarepusher records, especially as it’s tied to berserk drum patterns that carry a whiff of jazz. Anyone wondering whether genuine machine music can provoke an emotional response won’t find any answers here because it’s all wrapped up in the work of someone who has spent much of his career retreating from feeling. There’s no combat to this music—as strange as it sounds, this feels like a collaboration between like-minded peers.
That Jenkinson's involved in work of this type shouldn’t be a surprise, and to criticize it for being something it was never trying to be is an easy stumbling block to encounter when discussing Squarepusher. But there's still questions about the validity of Music for Robots beyond its status as a musical exercise. Most of it dips into detached terrain; the manic piano runs of “World Three” are rendered without drums, and the layered buildup on “Dissolver” is executed in such a precise manner that it’s positively suffocating in its rigidity. It leaves Z-Robots feeling somewhat pointless beyond the novelty status afforded to a group of machines performing on stage. But this is an album released on Warp with a notable contributor on board, which triggers wider questions about what it brings to the conversation—that is, a daring vision of the future that turns into a humdrum training session at the office.
