I’ve never entered a room to a chorus of “doinks” and “boings” before, but that’s exactly what greeted me as I entered the Dome to hear Sherwood and Pinch, respected dub producers, who have been collaborating since 2011.

 

It was a pleasant way to ease into the night – laid back beats, sleek samples, decaying loops and trippy, ticking hi-hats. A very cleverly reworked rendition of Bowie’s Space Oddity provided the set’s highlight – “Mind control to make you dumb…” and lyrics to voice a discontentment with modern life’s apathy, gadgetry and destruction of the planet. Nicely crafted indeed.

 

Sherwood and Pinch were to serve as a slightly misleading pre-cursor to the main act, Squarepusher. Arriving on stage in full fencing gear (mask included), with two huge white screens behind him and banks of computers and various other electrical gizmos to his left and right, Squarepusher (aka Tom Jenkinson) opened with a wonky and often bonky number that rapidly transformed into a dizzying assault of electronic noise, broken beats and polyrhythmic skulduggery. Monochrome projections spewed onto the screens behind him as leering, sneering splurges of sound pushed the Dome’s sound system to within an inch of its normally very cultured existence.

 

This was hands down the loudest gig I’ve attended at the Dome by quite some decibels, but whereas the speakers groaned with some of Sherwood and Pinch’s drops, it purred with Squarepusher’s. His drops are without doubt the hardest, deepest and most aggressive I’ve experienced, but the music is so incredibly engineered that the frequencies don’t melt the building down.

 

For anyone hoping for material from the twisted experimental jazz/funk era of his career, it may have been a disappointing evening. Things fared better for the drum’n’bass heads, as although this period of his output was again largely ignored, the modern Squarepusher has lovely nods to d’n’b and some gloriously mangled breaks. Tonight’s set was principally 2015’s Damogen Furies – songs which basically make Aphex Twin’s Come To Daddy seem like a lullaby. Everything is at 100 miles an hour and turned up to 11 without any form of relent. There are definitely times when it all gets a bit much, especially when turning round to see members of the audience dancing like loons – God knows what they were hearing, as no-one was remotely in sync with one another, nor with the music as far as I could tell. It’s these moments when memories of bad trips have to be pushed aside, and one must take a deep breath and let the next tsunami sized drop wash over.

 

The combination of sound and vision was spectacular, holding an incredible synergy that made them appear as one. A lot of the projections were variations of the concept of TV white noise, marrying with the sounds that characterise so many of Squarepusher’s compositions. Pale colours were gradually added to the palate as the music got fruitier (if that’s possible) until the set momentarily paused for a slower number, which rapidly accelerated back up to breakneck speed, with the screens drenched in a visceral, hellish red. Did I see a distorted Aphex Twin symbol flash up at one point? Either way, there was no sensory let-up to be had at any point.

 

Amidst the sonic siege, I was reminded of Graham Greene’s short story, The Destructors, where a group of young boys go about destroying every single item in a poor old man’s house; down to the last brick. There’s a key line that resonates, “— and destruction after all is a form of creation.” That somehow fits: Squarepusher can at times feel like he is turning music inside out or shredding it to see what happens to its pieces, but the imagination applied to his art is mindboggling. The results are nothing short of spectacular, unwavering and undiluted. If you ever go to a Squarepusher show, you’ll never forget it.

Adam Atkins