Squarepusher

Hard Normal Daddy (1997)

Hard Normal Daddy is the record where Squarepusher's two obsessions — breakneck, digitally chopped breakbeats and genuinely accomplished jazz-fusion bass playing — sit most comfortably side by side. The rhythm programming is dense almost to the point of overload, drum edits arriving faster than a human drummer could physically play them, while Jenkinson's bass lines underneath sound completely live and melodically fluent. "Beep Street" is the clearest example of that tension working, virtuoso playing riding a breakbeat that refuses to settle into a groove. It remains one of the most technically demanding records to come out of the mid-'90s Warp/Rephlex scene, and one of the least imitated simply because so few other producers can play like Jenkinson does.

Sleeve notes

Hard Normal Daddy · 1997

Tom Jenkinson began recording as Squarepusher in the mid-1990s from Essex. His 1996 debut, Feed Me Weird Things, appeared on Aphex Twin's Rephlex label and already showed what set him apart from other producers working in similar drill-and-bass territory at the time: Jenkinson was also a genuinely skilled jazz bassist, and much of his music treats the bass guitar as a lead instrument rather than a foundation for someone else's melody.

Hard Normal Daddy (1997), his first album for Warp, brought that fusion-inflected bass playing into closer alignment with breakneck, intricately edited drum programming. Jenkinson's catalog since has moved between that approach and more purely electronic, occasionally much harsher material, resisting any single description of what a Squarepusher record is supposed to sound like. He has continued releasing music steadily, including work with the "virtual band" Shobaleader One, a live setup built around masked, robot-like stage personas that extends his interest in blurring human performance and machine precision into the visual side of his shows.