Squarepusher is an artist who loves deconstruction, that is immediately clear from the name - his role as the musician reduced to understated, binary-brained mechanical input. Maybe that's why his fourth album,
Selection Sixteen, reminds me a bit of an episode of How It's Made. Remember that show? It was an educational series for children which explained how various manufacturing processes work - worthwhile and informative stuff no doubt, but equally guilty of permanently erasing some small sense of wonder in anyone who ever watched it.
Selection Sixteen feels similar as an overall experience as it methodically dispells its own illusion. Things start out reasonably well - inoffensive intro track "The Eye" loads the listener into the album's virtual facility before highlights in the opening half like "Square Rave" and "Dedicated Loop" showcase a fairly cool if rarely overtly exciting assembly line of hydraulic piston-like beats and dynamic acidic bloops. The acid techno influence, which is the album's biggest stylistic departure from Squarepusher's previous sound, reacts pleasantly enough with his trademark intricate, whirring, clanking beats or breaks designed to telegraph directional shifts. It's a sort of Rube Goldberg approach to songwriting that works well early on for the most part and there are several great moments as the various bouncing and rolling components line up with satisfying momentum, like the unravelling tinny drum patterns and sheen of chrome-like twinkling throughout "Tommorrow World". Even here in the stronger opening half of the album though there are ponderous stop-starts in short interlude tracks like "Cool Veil", which smatters a few of the album's tentative and ineffectual applications of nu-jazz. It's difficult not to suspect that these very speculative soundbites were included only to caulk over gaps of incompatibility between the longer songs.
As
Selection Sixteen conveyer belts the listener deeper into its hodgepodge of machinery, the sense of dysfunction intensifies. "Schizm Track #1" is fairly enjoyable with its squirty injection mold-like textures but the name is apt as it forecasts the impending gulf in quality to come like the underdeveloped "Snake Pass" and "Acid Tape Track", the inconsequential mess of "Mind Rubbers", or the overly derivative "Schizm Track #2 Mix". The interludes too get more jarring, erratic, and increasingly obvious in their failed attempts at masking the album's lack of cohesion: "Freeway" is more nu-jazz that achieves very little while "Yo" and "Tesko" are no more than unwanted fluff clogging the turn of the album's struggling cogs.
Selection Sixteen ends on a relative highpoint with the enjoyable if slightly overlong "Ceephax Mix", but at the same time the song serves as something of an admission that Squarepusher was severely lacking in ideas and direction for this release. Ceephax, who is Squarepusher's brother, had a burgeoning silly and nostalgiaic acid house career of his own back in 1999 so while the exposure for him here feels like supportive fraternal love, his contribution with what is a noticeably disparate closing song betrays a sense that Squarepusher phoned this one in.
Selection Sixteen features a solid collection of ideas, but certainly not an album's worth due to an overarching lack of focus and character; disassembling the more interesting components reveals a worrying absence of inner harmony and a structural integrity that is ramshackle at best.
