The Click: Squarepusher
In his own words, Squarepusher reflects the impact of a childhood urge to test himself.
I have always been fascinated by motion, particularly motion at high speed. Over the years I’ve tried to explore the limit of intelligibility as it relates to speed in music. But at a certain point in my childhood my fascination with speed was focused on a more everyday objective: I just wanted to run as fast as possible.
One of my earliest memories is of a particular afternoon when I was around four years old. I could run by this point, and it was great fun. I loved running up and down the garden, pretending I was a train, imagining flying along on tracks taking me to who cares where – it was the exhilaration of the journey that was the point. But I felt as if something was missing, that I wanted to run faster but I didn’t know how this could be done.
Then came the moment that stands out very clearly in my memory: I remember looking at a grass verge in the garden, and deciding very consciously to run faster than I ever had done before. I remember commanding my legs to reach a new level of speed. I ran along the verge and with an enormous surge of excitement realised that I was indeed running faster – the fastest I had ever run! At the time it seemed to me I had produced this extra speed simply by telling myself to do it.
It was a critical realisation for me, as ever since it has given me a sense that much can be achieved through an effort of will alone. That simply wanting something to happen, if you want it hard and sincerely enough, is a large part of what makes things possible. In particular it has been central to my experience of learning to play instruments, which broadly takes the form of “this is now what I want to do – I’ve decided I can do it, and now I just have to wait for my hands to catch up”. Once you decide with absolute certainty, then trying isn’t necessary. You decide, and your limbs follow.
Lamental is out now via Warp
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