Squarepusher - Ultravisitor

’s ninth album is the return to form that his fans have been waiting for since ‘99. Although his two most recent albums (‘Go Plastic’ in 2001 and ‘Do You Know Squarepusher?’ in 2002) showed promise, they were not up to the standard of early albums like ‘Hard Normal Daddy’ and ‘Big Loada’. ‘Ultravisitor’ gives the people what they want - an intravenous injection of acid. While none of the tracks have quite the spazz-out quality of 1997’s ‘Come On My Selector’, many come close, with the frenetic drum programming, ethereal high notes and other assorted noises that we have come to love.

The album showcases Tom’s incredible talent, both on the electronics side and instrumentally. The second track, ‘I Fulcrum’, is very much jazz inspired and reminiscent of Miles Davis’ ‘Bitches Brew’, and the calmer bass-guitar solo provides a welcome interlude between the high-speed drum and bass noise, just as the lone piano tracks on Aphex Twin’s ‘Drukqs’ gave the listener some breathing space, showing that Squarepusher is not afraid to switch up the tempo now and then. Other stand out tracks include the gorgeously mellow ‘Iambic 9 Poetry’, the absurdly fast bass plucking of ‘C-Town Smash’, and the drill ‘n’ bass mash up of ‘District Line 11’. Although some of the tracks do sound like a car crash speeded up, they never fail to innovate, and always get heads nodding.

All in all, ‘Ultravisitor’ has a much warmer, more organic feeling than we have seen in ‘Squarepusher’’s previous material. Although the sense of humour that came through in earlier albums is mostly absent here, its absence is more than made up for in the emotion that each track is dripping with. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Tom has not tweaked up his music to the point that it is unintelligible. Although the formula by which his music is made (if it can be called a formula) is more mathematical than musical, it is perhaps a testament to his skill with numbers that the music that comes out the other end is more than a balanced equation; as he put it in a recent interview, ‘music… can at least be kick-started from the point of view of solving, or at least offering a distraction from, a problem… I am obliged to become both problem generator and problem solver.’