Stereotype

Tom Jenkinson recorded Stereotype in July 1994 at a friend’s parents’ house in deep Essex, at the very end of a regional train line. For two weeks, the suburb became an unlikely footnote in dance music history, the site of what Jenkinson called a Stella-fueled “continuum of rave onslaught,” as teenagers came and went at all hours. Jenkinson was on a mission to make a record, and kept the tape rolling to capture what he came up with between makeshift DJ sets and listening sessions. You can hear this freedom—like the feeling of not having an enforced bedtime for the first time in your life—in the acid-house sugar rush of “Whooshki” that kicks off Stereotype and works itself into an ecstatic frenzy over the course of 16 minutes.

With its four-to-the-floor techno rhythm, which builds up piece by piece over the course of its first eight minutes, “Whooshki” sounds exactly like what you’d expect from an embryonic Squarepusher—a bit like an early version of “Theme From Earnest Borgnine.” The ultra-processed breakbeats, and the jazzy bits, wouldn’t come until a year later. Instead, Stereotype is in thrall to what came a year or two before it: Aphex Twin’s Analogue Bubblebath series, early Autechre records, and early-’90s breakbeat hardcore. It sounds like a talented young artist driven to make with no particular inspiration beyond imitating what he already loved, and doing it without a care for editing or economy.

Jenkinson pressed Stereotype onto one 12" record, including a 27-minute long first side—which, in vinyl terms, means horrible sound and almost no bass—that barely made it into the shops and sent Jenkinson back to the drawing board to discover a richer, more complex style. This all makes Stereotype a curious, almost touchingly naive record in his catalogue, not quite the “The Lost Squarepusher Album” Warp is framing it as for this reissue. Even the earliest records under the Squarepusher name, like Conumber, are miles ahead of it, dextrous and limber where Stereotype just bludgeons you over the head. (The reissue, at least, has been repressed as a 2xLP.)

But there’s pleasure in that direct approach. The extended bliss-out “Whooshki” predicts the emo-acid freakout of Roy of the Ravers by two decades, and there’s something charmingly out of time about its extreme length, as if Jenkinson were unsure if he was making a dance record or a Klaus Schulze odyssey. There’s also “1994,” another lengthy workout that starts with a quote from a 1984 radio play and runs on twitchy, speed-freak drums; it’s a bridge between early Moving Shadow records and the drill’n’bass fireworks of Feed Me Weird Things.

“O’Brien” digs even deeper into the dark underbelly of UK hardcore, with nimble percussion that switches between passages of hectic breakbeat and halftime with the grace of a figure skater, a hint of the rhythmic genius that would come later. Still, the splashy hi-hat sounds place it in the lineage of early, dreamy AFX tracks. Even here, at his clubbiest, Jenkinson was showing signs of what would come later: a bent toward home listening and sonic experimentalism. Maybe Stereotype would have been more suited to a CD than an overstuffed 12" after all. The remaining three tracks, like “Greenwidth,” offer a competent if drab take on techno that’s as influenced by IDM as second-wave Detroit, but they feel more like genre exercises after the emotional onslaught of the first three epics.

Capturing a brilliant artist when he was still wet behind the ears, Stereotype will mainly be of interest to Squarepusher heads. Or maybe ’90s techno nerds, though there are many other examples of similar music done better even before Jenkinson took over that Southminster home. But as a piece of electronic music history, Stereotype is just fun, a rare opportunity to hear an otherwise very nerdy artist jamming with friends and making a record for the sheer reason of wanting to make a record, with no label—or any kinds of obligations, really—getting in the way. It’s the sound of innocence and possibility, of someone loving what they were doing so much they don’t want to hit the stop button, before the drugs wear off and the twirling melodies and samples curdle into something darker. Thankfully, Jenkinson didn’t go that route. He found an obsessive love of jazz and cutting up breakbeats and dug his own stubborn, zig-zagging path until he found his name alongside the kinds of artists he emulates on Stereotype.