5 out of 5

Label: Lo Recordings

Produced by: Andy Jenkinson

I realize it made sense to characterize Andy Jenkinson’s work in the frame of that of his brother’s – Tom Jenkinson, a.k.a. Squarepusher – but I’m here from the future of Ceephax Acid Crew to report that Andy’s first album under that name was phenomenal, full stop. While the brothers were working in tangential acid realms, Tom could be characterized as the “arty” brother, and Andy as the “playful” one, but the trick with the latter: it was also art.

I’ve fallen in and out with Squarepusher over the years, Tom’s first Feed Me Weird Things definitely a landmark lesson for my ears in terms of how electronic music can smush with other genres, but his music has, since then, come across as a struggling for identity, with some pauses where he figures it out. Meanwhile, that playfulness of Andy’s has proven to be confidence in his own playful sound, an identity steady from the start, even while doing his own experimenting; perhaps his dodging of the Squarepusher spotlight – or a need to avoid direct comparisons – set Andy down this path.

Whatever way I want to rationalize it, his first album – Acid Quakers 1000 – is, firstly, brilliant, and secondly, exactly of the ilk I’m describing: there’s a looseness to it that belies how damn zipped up it is; the Atari-esque album art and the underlying poppiness of the beats does the same. The A-side’s opening pairs are where this magic trick is most obvious: Ceephax allows the base groove to be kind of loose and simple. Almost too simple in a way: catchy, but amateurish. But then the other synth layers come in, stuttering, adding shape, and before you realize it, you’re listening to an acid banger that has calmly shed its demure outer layer for its colorful undergarments, while still hanging on to that initial beat. It’s damn charming stuff.

The B-side dives in a bit more directly with the acid, letting its beats churn for minutes on end, but Andy reels it in such that it’s never just monotonous club banging. This is somewhere on the spectrum between Aphex Classics-era techno and DMX Krew dance jamz: the beats are serious and moody when they’re in motion, but they’re played with a smile.

The short duration of the album (considered a “mini-album” on Discogs) perhaps helps this to be all killer, but it’s noteworthy that all of that killer feels fully developed, and also sequenced to work both as slightly different A-side / B-side vibes (kind of a day and night of this sound), and as a single listening experience.

Note: the digital version I’m listening to apparently differs in runtime from the original (see comments here), so I can’t speak to the latter both in terms of those differences and the production quality – hence noting the version in the review title.