Music Arcades: Squarepusher: Hard Normal Daddy

Unlike yesterday's Moondance, Hard Normal Daddy feels impossible to reconstruct from memory, even minutes after it's over. It's an over-abundant music, mostly very dense, and still imposing even when it's not.

Too many things going on and too much to keep up with. The opening track, Coopers World, mostly has a seventies jazz fusion feel to it, but then
at around three minutes in, it briefly sounds like the Yes of Release, Release. Elsewhere it evokes, for me, all sorts of stuff, from Sabres of Paradise to contemporary dance compositions like Fred Frith's, or John Cale's soundtrack work. The unifying thread is that skittering snare sound that was briefly ubiquitous (cf. Goldie), but now just seems rooted in 1996/7.

When I bought this, I probably lumped Squarepusher in with Photek as "drum'n'bass/breakbeat guys that got played on Radio 3", specifically Mixing It. I pretty much put myself in their hands to sort out — and I'm well aware how dodgy this distinction is — the musically progressive stuff from the bandwagonmeisters.

Shortly after Hard Normal Daddy came out, Squarepusher moved to Sheffield. Of course he played at the various Warp and mini-festivals in the city, but what most endeared me to him was that he also hooked into the improv scene and collaborated with local players — I remember one duet in an unusual venue in Nether Edge with, I think, Mick Beck. No airs or graces, just a bloke called Tom Jenkinson with a bass guitar.