[Review] Squarepusher @Piknic Electronik

We went to see the crazy Squarepusher show at Parc Jean-Drapeau.

Tom Jenkinson who is better known as Squarepusher was in town at Piknic Electronik. The Piknic Electronik is held every Sunday and this weekend the MEG Festival partnered with them to deliver the Squarepusher show at Parc Jean-Drapeau. Located on an artificial island, the site gives you a dope view of the city and the overall mood of the Piknic weekends are laid back, light, fun and not pretentious at all.

Now we’re going to be honest, we had no idea about Squarepusher’s music but people around us insisted it’s good and that the “light show” is fucking A, so we went. The visuals were in fact...awesome. Mr.Jenkinson wears a LED helmet which matches with the giant LED wall behind him as well with the smaller LED panel in front of him. The show was one of those moments of uncomfortable beauty. Our eyes were squinting so much due to the black and white light show but we didn’t complain. We were also in the first row so that didn’t help our case for the eye squinting part. If you’re easily impressed by giant LED walls which are synchronized to the beat (seemed that way to us), GO BUY A TICKET RIGHT NOW.

The music is a bit harder to explain, it’s a completely different sound from what we’re used to hearing at electronic shows. The aspect that we really appreciated from his performance is that he’s performing live, he’s not a press play dj, he isn’t just mixing his own tracks or remixes. The man is putting in work, playing on a drum machine (that’s our educated guess, his name is Squarepusher, we’ll leave it at that). He also played various tracks with a fretless guitar.

If you’ve never been to a Squarepusher show, don’t expect to dance too much, it’s not really music you can DANCE to, unless you’re really high, which was the case with a various number of people over there. Also, we wouldn’t necessarily recommend you to get shitface drunk at his show either; his music will more than likely drop your drunk ass to the ground. Shit’s intense, yo.

Squarepusher has a couple of West Coast shows coming up; Portland (July 31^st), San Francisco (August 2^nd) and Los Angeles (August 3^rd). All pictures were shot with Kodak Portra 400.