Oh, sexy, beautiful Squarepusher-- how I love thee! How I adore thy skittering beats, thy Atari sound effects, thy glorious, emotionless ways! Yes, I truly cannot wait to lie down upon thy latest effort, Music Is Rotted One Note, and to make sweet love to it, as is my personal and secret tradition for listening to thy records!

And then, I listened. And I listened, and I listened. This is not the Squarepusher I'm familiar with. Squarepusher is rapid-fire drum-n-bass, melodic and soulless. But this-- it's pure, electric jazz in the vein of late- '70s, electric Miles Davis. And, in the electronic community, nothing like it has ever been done before.

Jungle music-- if you haven't noticed-- refuses to become stagnant. It's always mutating, probably because its artists, for the most part, are truly inventive and imaginative people. Tom Jenkinson (aka Squarepusher) is one of the people we can always count on to push the boundaries. When Jenkinson made his American full- length debut with 1996's Feed Me Weird Things, the world had never experienced anything even remotely like his blend of super-hi bpm breakbeats and progressive jazz. Now, only two years later, he's taken things in an entirely different directon. No big surprise.

Music Is Rotted One Note is 48 minutes of pure Miles Davis/ Teo Macero- influenced jazz, all played live-- you heard right. There's not a sequenced note or wicked breakbeat on the whole record. So... a purely organic electronic record? Yeah, and the result is a decidedly diverse and funky blend of Talking Heads- style African percussion, slap-bass, and wah-wah keyboards that's as much drug music as any Negativland or Brian Eno record, and twice as much fun.

This record is, without a doubt, one of the most original albums in the history of electronic music. It's executed so skillfully that it leaves no doubt that Tom Jenkinson is, at the very least, a complete master of his art. Whatever you do, don't come into the album expecting Squarepusher's traditional sound; instead, expect something completely different, completely new, and completely fucking awesome.

-Ryan Schreiber