"01100111 01101100 01101001 01110100 01100011 01101000" (Squarepusher - Damogen Furies)

Squarepusher
Damogen Furies

why you'll love it: incredible glitchy madness

why you'll hate it: sounds like total nonsense

Too much of a good thing is very real.  For decades, Squarepusher has been serving up jazz influenced electronic music, with production and concepts far ahead of its time.  From 1995 to 1999 alone, we’re talking nearly 6 hours of instrumentals.  Many of which spit directly into the eye of ABACB pop song formatting.   Many use deafening static, or periods of silence/drone to accent that jazz trope of “the notes he’s not playing.  Every so often, a live bass guitar makes an appearance, but Squarepusher’s core sound is a mash up of Futurama’s Hypnotoad, playing a YMO LP at 77 RPM, and that one weird channel on your TV you’re not quite sure why you get.

I couldn’t be happier that this kind of music exists.  As a fan of “glitch art” in general (yes, I know how trite that sounds in 2015, but I’d be lying otherwise), Squarepusher’s aggressive outputs aim to stay one step ahead of, and against the trends of electronic music.  I anticipate every one of his releases, but the Squarepusher bulldozer of crushing machines seemingly never stops.  Those 6 hours of instrumentals have more than doubled over the past fifteen years (and that isn’t including his side projects, such as Shobaleader One).  I went into Damogen Furies with an expectation to be initially floored; but knowing it’s all just going to go into the Squarepusher vat to congeal with all of his other (mostly) similiar sounding tunes.

Damogen Furies may stick a bit longer, though, for one very good reason.  Clocking in at under 45 minutes, it’s mercifully short.  It could stand to be two tracks shorter, but some fat trimming really has come a long way to get much more repeated listens than even my favorite Squarepusher albums (Hello Everything or Feed Me Weird Things).  Having only 8 songs helps keep more tracks in your memory bank by the end of the album as well; because, believe me, Damogen Furies packs just as much shell shock as any other hard hitting Squarepusher album.  The fucking ballistic live video for “Rayc Fire 2” (wordlessly) says it all.  The construction of this song is like a high speed Rube Goldberg machine infused with a world-record breaking domino track, powered by the infamous Max Headroom cable hacker.  “Baltang Arg” is a fucking wormhole in audio form.  When I finished listening to that song, I expected to see Maggie Simpson tell me “this is indeed a disturbing universe”.  “Kontenjaz” and “Stor Eiglass” share tinges of twee melodies, but as you can tell by the song titles, Squarepusher isn’t trying to make you dance.  Any fun you have is purely coincidental.  This is art music.  Either you are drawn to it, or you aren’t.

I hate to break down a work of art to something as glib as that last sentence, but Squarepusher isn’t changing for anyone.  It’s still a whole lot of glitchy noise, which I somewhat mean as a term of endearment.  Damogen Furies, like most of Squarepusher’s vicious archive, sounds like a beatdown by gang of coked up Xerox machines.  Is that a good or bad thing?  That’s for my therapist to determine….