Squarepusher "Hello Meow"

Thomas Jenkinson is a crack bassist with an ear for interesting arrangements, and way back on 1998’s Music is Rotted One Note (ancient but still fresh) he ably demonstrated his grasp of jazz fusion via a thorough deconstruction and refreshing electronic recontextualization of the form. But I have the feeling that if he hadn’t ever come across Carl Craig or Aphex Twin, Jenkinson could have taken the Victor Wooten route, where wizardly demonstrations of instrumental prowess are much more valued than musical artistry. Jenkinson grew up with Miles Davis but came of age during drum and bass, and he fell in with the Rephlex crowd and discovered how to twist the conventions of both to make something novel and pretty exciting. While dumb genre tags were being invented for what Jenkinson (and Aphex Twin) were doing (the unimaginative “drill ‘n bass” being the most common), he thankfully kept electronic innovation, rather than bass wankery, as his musical MO . He has a good track record of effectively incorporating his favorite instrument into his songs, allowing it to stand out without drawing all the attention to itself, like on “Hello Meow” (mp3) from the forthcoming Hello Everything, where it jumps out from behind an attractive vibraphone melody and his familiar (perhaps a little too familiar now, Tom) hyperkinetic drums. Jenkinson shows off a little here, but it plays effectively in this context as he not only keeps pace, but shucks and jives with the jacked-up computer-created percussion on his all-too-human-sounding slapped bass. Then, in a timely moment of restraint, Jenkinson retreats to let the infinitely more attractive refrain reappear and take the song to its conclusion.