Squarepusher, Four Tet

Squarepusher

Antone's, April 21

Four Tet

The Parish, April 24 With a pair of England's most astute electronic beat programmers descending upon town within days of each other, Austin treated itself with large doses of digital manipulation. Wednesday night at Antone's, Squarepusher alternated swirling laptop rinses with showers of bass dementia. Approximating a jazz so distorted that it morphs before ears like Bitches Brew cauliflower blossom then is flushed down the drain, collapsing loops met mirrored images in fragmented hyperspace. Pumping his right fist as his accelerated machine-gun funk electrified the chem-trail residue floating about the room, the man of few words tapped into forces existing far beyond the established matrix of reason. Deducing the language of R2D2 as played by Brian Eno, Tom Jenkinson patched a synthesizer into his bass in order to prove its merit as a viable solo instrument. Proficient as an inverted octopus, Sparesquisher covered the expanse of a no-wave power trio with his frantic thumping serving as drum machine, pedal effects acting as turntable, and feedback as keyboards. His experimental displays left jaws ajar as somehow his conceptual puzzles raised fevered flesh from metal. Equally able to extract poignant semblances of humanity from the depths of frigid binary paradigms, Four Tet affected the Parish on Saturday night with his own brand of fleeting digital conjecture. Equipped with dual laptops joined by a glitch-tricked mixer, the sheepish Kieran Hebden meandered his way through lopsided mazes of compressed drum flutters, intentional skips, and reversed loops. Whether his adherence to the "sheets of sound" theory breaks down the parameters of hip-hop/house/pop or merely refuses to build up to such conformity is a yet another instance of a double-edged dialectic at work. With listeners constantly hanging from the fringes of normalcy, Four Tet administered just enough of a rush to act as side effect to his enthralling intellectual enhancements.