Squarepusher’s Tom Jenkinson is not a man prone to inertia. Since his breakout in the mid-’90s with the frenetic avant drum’n’bass of Feed Me Weird Things and Hard Normal Daddy, his career has assumed a sort of pinball trajectory, bouncing from prettified electroacoustic music to solo bass noodling to a period spent composing for a robotic band (see 2014 EP Music for Robots), clinging to instrumental virtuosity as a guiding precept. In this respect, the live-band project Shobaleader One is simultaneously a clean break and business as usual, being both the start of a new phase and the point at which a few older ideas fully germinate.
The Shobaleader One concept came to life in 2010, with an album titled Squarepusher Presents Shobaleader One: d’Demonstrator. Incorporating elements of R&B, heavy metal, and Jenkinson’s own treated vocals, it purported to be the work of a live band, but was probably just the work of Jenkinson himself. But d’Demonstrator did attract some fellow travelers, and early in 2016, Shobaleader One emerged as a genuine touring entity—Jenkinson on bass, plus three musicians going by the names Strobe Nazard, Company Laser, and Arg Nution, taking on keyboards, drums, and guitar, respectively. At their gigs, this “space-pop” quartet set about reworking a number of Squarepusher standards through the medium of hyperspeed jazz-funk, their identities concealed by masks that look like malfunctioning Tenori-on.
While not explicitly presented as a live album, Elektrac seems to be taken in part from concert recordings, though were it not for the light applause that punctuates each track you might not notice. The recordings are crystal-clear, and there is no doubting the chops of the band themselves, who handle their task with virtuoso ease. Some tracks here feel well suited to a Shobaleader overhaul. A sprint through “Coopers World” from 1997’s Hard Normal Daddy imagines it as the score to some hardboiled ’70s cop-drama, all sticky wah-wah guitar and limber-fingered keyboard runs. “E8 Boogie” is pretty much a showcase for Jenkinson’s genuinely startling warp-speed bass plucking. Elsewhere, there’s some entertainment in watching the outfit stretch to cover distant corners of Squarepusher’s artistic mien. Company Laser nearly blows a circuit trying to replicate the drill’n’bass flurries of “Journey to Reedham,” while the ensemble show impressive restraint on a blissfully centered take on “Iambic 5 Poetry,” the pretty, vibes-laden standout from 1999’s Budakhan Mindphone.
These enjoyable moments are balanced by stretches where you realize you’re not so much enjoying Elektrac as being subjected to it. “Don’t Go Plastic” and “Squarepusher Theme” solo interminably, while a mid-album turn towards the heavy turns out low points like “Megazine”—Daft Punk gone metal gone wrong—and a rather cold and lifeless technical riffer called “Delta-V.” Jenkinson has explained he wants Shobaleader One to sound like “an insane band.” But nothing here verges on the elemental extremity or deranged humor displayed by earlier groups fusing jazz and metal—Lightning Bolt, for instance, or John Zorn’s Naked City. Instead, these tracks balance loudness with a rather fussy and joyless quality; fun to play, probably, not so much to listen to.
In a 2016 interview with Q magazine, Jenkinson described Shobaleader One as a reaction to the current state of electronic music production. “Software companies, partly in order to further their business aims, have made it so easy to make electronic music that the format in general is beginning to assume a troubling air of painting-by-numbers pointlessness,” he said. Look closer at Shobaleader’s gleaming metal carapace—can you see the jazz snob poking through? The idea that an album of finicky jazz-funk covers is the answer to anything in 2017 is a little rich. But more broadly, I’d say Jenkinson’s assessment is flawed. The increasing availability of production software has enabled the rise of music-makers otherwise marginalized for geographic or economic reasons—think localized sounds like grime, or gqom, or, if you want to go back further, those early jungle productions that gave Squarepusher its initial impetus. As ever, it’s not so much about the tools, but what you do with them. And while it’s laudable that Jenkinson is always moving, never resting, Elektrac feels a bit of a sideshow: a flexing of technique with little to display but its own shiny spectacle.
