Tom Jenkinson might have wanted to go back to his roots as his discography hit the 25-year mark, but “back to basics” was out of the question. From his earliest work as Squarepusher, his inclination to take the structures of acid house, jungle, and glitch to their most far-flung IDM-wracked conclusions — and then decide, once he’d reached it, that it wasn’t a conclusion at all but a next step — made his music so unpredictably iconoclastic that the formative stretch of the ’90s where he decided to lean into jazz fusion bass is still considered more of his wheelhouse than a bizarre diversion. But after Damogen Furies flirted with EDM accessibility — and then self-sabotaged that potential big-tent sound with his characteristic tendency to keep his rhythms almost panicky in their restlessness — a regrouping like Be Up A Hello wound up feeling oddly reassuring. While Squarepusher’s best work feels like it’s simultaneously embracing the sounds of his machinery and thrashing around attempting to break out of the structures that machinery encourages, the material here — recorded on largely vintage equipment dating back to an ’80s Commodore VIC-20 — does so like it’s comfortable in the struggle. The squishy 303s and the almost whimsical tunes they make on “Oberlove” radiate a baroque strain of melodic joy that makes the frantic pace of the trapped-hornet-swarm backbeat feel too elated to be overwhelming. The onrush of acidic frenzy in “Nervelevers” perpetually threatens to resolve into something even more tense than its laserblast fast-forward trip through rock-tumbler percussion, but the fact that it never really gets out of hand makes its initially chaotic-seeming dynamism feel like a thrill ride you forget is on rails. And while that sense of controlled havoc sustains many of the best tracks on Be Up A Hello — the porcelain-cracking hyper-fissures of “Terminal Slam” and the oozing chemical belches of “Speedcrank” are purestrain examples of his drum tracks’ ability to sound like a feat of impossible rhythmic dexterity — it’s all the more impressive that in the midst of all that reassuring classic-mode freneticism Jenkinson also drops an ambient track as graceful and unapologetically pretty in its hybridized kosmische-soul as “Detroit People Mover”.

– Nate Patrin