ES7138 seven-inch features Squarepusher
‘Vaclament A’
‘S4 021 D2’ / ‘S4 021 B2’
“These tracks don’t really lend themselves to neat descriptions,” says Tom Jenkinson, aka fearless sonic innovator Squarepusher. “So I think it’s maybe better for me to talk about how they were made and then let the readers of Electronic Sound come up with their own ideas about what they think might be going on.”
It’s always best to expect the unexpected from Squarepusher. And that’s most certainly the case with the two parts of ‘Vaclament A’ featured on this month’s Electronic Sound seven-inch. Recorded in Tom’s shed during 2022, neither of these tracks have ever been released before.
“They have a precedent in a piece called ‘Vacuum Garden’ from my 2006 album ‘Hello Everything’, which used sine waves that I made with this old valve signal generator,” he continues. “It had a switch for accessing different ranges and a rotary dial to select the frequency. As a sort of jokey challenge to myself, I set out to try and make something that was musically satisfying but using only this signal generator. There was no processing of the sounds it made, bar me adding a touch of reverb, and the sine waves were layered up on a Tascam MSR-16 multitrack recorder.”
The A-side of ‘Vaclament A’ is ‘S4 021 D2’, a very gradually unfurling tonal pattern that is incredibly hypnotic and totally enveloping. The seven-inch is cut at 33 rpm to be able to accommodate the ebb and flow of the track across seven glorious minutes.
“’S4 021 D2’ uses groups of sine waves of shifting frequencies,” explains Tom. “In this case, each group is a chord comprised of eight notes. As a chord becomes audible, it’s first heard at an origin pitch, but the frequencies shift very slowly downwards over time, so it’s dropped around a semitone by the time it begins to fade out. The next chord then comes in as the previous one is still audible, in a consonant harmonic relationship to the previous chord at its pitch of destination, though not with its point of origin.
“That’s where it becomes interesting for me. To my mind, the long duration of the downward drift is such that it’s perceived less as an event in terms of pitch and more as a texture. The slowness of the drift obscures the impact of the semitone transposition. We would probably hear it like a change in key if the transposition was immediate or very fast, so this piece explores how the speed of pitch transition affects our impression of what musical events are occurring.”
Both ‘S4 021 D2’ and the heavier and darker ‘S4 021 B2’ on the B-side were created with the help of Tom’s “interval system”, which self-generates audio from a battered laptop during the gaps between tracks at the Squarepusher live performances. ‘S4 021 B2’ is an improvisation on a MIDI guitar, triggering the interval system’s synth.
“I restrung the guitar with the strings in the opposite order, so how they’d be on a left-handed instrument,” says Tom. “As I’m right-handed, I wanted it to give me another perspective on what I was doing. I wanted to interrupt the habits that can get in the way when you are trying to play spontaneously. Every player who improvises will fall into familiar patterns from time to time, so I like to try and stop that happening.
“To make it even more weird for me, I recorded the improvisation in total darkness, which almost led to me accidentally deleting the MIDI recording once it was finished. The synth was set up so that the velocity of the MIDI notes was controlling the frequency modulation index, but then other synth parameters were controlled by pedals. I did a few different versions, but this one was the most compelling. With a couple of adjustments to note lengths and velocity values, it was done.”
