Squarepusher - Stereotype

A precious and until now almost clandestine document, finally given the presentation it deserves. In 1994, before Thomas Jenkinson was Squarepusher, before Rephlex, before Warp, he was pressing records under a different name and finding his way into the music with the help of a Chelmsford friend named Hardy Finn, who would go on to co-found the Spymania label that launched the Squarepusher alias the following year. The result was Stereotype, six long tracks crammed onto a single 12-inch with the sound quality compromise that entailed, circulated in a limited run and left to find its own audience through pirate radio and rave before disappearing into the underground entirely.

Thirty years later, released on Warp and remastered carefully from the original tapes, the music finally sounds the way it should. Spread across two LPs rather than forced onto a single disc, the tracks breathe and reveal the full detail of what Jenkinson was already capable of at this embryonic stage. This is music from before the jungle breakbeats that would define Feed Me Weird Things, before the fretless bass acrobatics, before the IDM complexity that made his name. What you hear instead is a young musician with both feet squarely in the rave, making techno that hammers along at 150 and 170 beats per minute with the kind of fluid, natural momentum that comes from someone who has absorbed the music so completely it pours out of him. "Whooshki" reveals the earliest evidence of Jenkinson's gift for melody in an acid line that writhes through crashing 909 drums. "O'Brien" and "Greenwidth" push into darker, more hypnotic territory. The entire record captures a moment just before genius clarified into something the world could name.

The sleeve has been updated with rare photos, flyers, and musical notation from the Squarepusher archives. Available for the first time since that original limited run in 1994, and essential for anyone serious about the history of British electronic music.