[Updates below.]

The show was awesome. Antone's was packed and the crowd was eager to see Squarepusher get on stage.

My friends and I got there right around 10pm and stood in line. Much to our chagrin, the ticket holder line wrapped around the corner while the "will call"/"at the door"/VIP ticket line was never more than three or four people deep. Not that we missed a whole lot for the ten or so minutes we waited outside. The openers were DJ Jonny J and Cassetteboy. The DJ playing when we entered the building was spinning breaks and drum 'n bass. I believe this is the same DJ who spun after Cassetteboy took the stage, but I can't be sure. It was alright, but there was little effort put into the mix.

I do know that Cassetteboy put on an...unorthodox...performance. It consisted of two guys running around the stage in those exaggerated George W. Bush and Tony Blair masks you see at anti-war protests. They changed clothes a few times, mainly to accentuate the physical love they portrayed the two politicians as feeling for one another. That may be the least offensive way I can put it. I think the music was prerecorded because they did no knob-twiddling and played no instruments. Then again, how you'd "play" their music live is beyond me. It was a long uninterrupted mix of speech, news, and audiobook clips hacked together to say whatever Cassetteboy wanted them to say: Harry Potter getting oral sex, Prime Minister Blair talking about hurting children, President Bush discussing the threat America poses to the world, and Michael Jackson on how he fondles kids. Among other things. It got the crowd going and was unique, but ultimately the on-stage antics got tired and I got antsy for Squarepusher to come out. I noticed a stagehand setting up two guitars while Cassetteboy was wrapping up and I wondered just how much Jenkinson was going to use them.

When he finally did walk out around 12:10am, we went nuts. He went immediately into his set. It's hard to describe his live music. I only recognized three of the "tracks" that he played, partly because he did so much live guitar work. Bass guitar work. The most amazing bass instrumentation I've ever heard. The man is a gawddamn adult prodigy. I've had an electric bass for a few years and I know the demands it places on the guitarist, especially those guitarists who "thumb-thwack" the strings to create the classic funk bass sound. As far as I could tell, Jenkinson almost exclusively thwacked the strings rather than plucked or strummed them. Additionally, it didn't seem that he used a whole lot of audio processing work on the bass signal. He had some signals processing going on, but I think he did a great deal of the processing simply by his method of playing. It was surprising how much he did live that I thought he would have done through his synths, samplers, and laptop.

His reputation as a flake and someone who may not have a solid connection with reality notwithstanding, he was upbeat the whole show, banging his arms and head around to his percussion and he thanked the audience several times. Thick English accent. He spoke infrequently, but the enthusiasm he felt was obvious. He didn't have his Ultravisitor beard even though it looked as if he stepped off the cover photo shoot and walked onstage. He ended the show with an encore, picking "Come on My Selector" as the ending song.

After witnessing this live show and experiencing the heretofore unknown progressive drill 'n bass jazz of Music is Rotted One Note, my respect for Squarepusher has skyrocketed. Good show, mate. Good show.

UPDATED 5/26/2005 8:55am
Autechre stopped by Austin and I went to check them out.