Craig Smith

There is only one filmed version of Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher) performing Tetra-Sync. It takes place in Camden, London during 2005. He's strumming a bass guitar and has two sturdy laptops in front of him, another guitar by his feet, synthesis module racks on two sides of him, microphone on a stand, and a small video feed beneath a desktop computer monitor to his right.

When Nietzsche said that one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star, he might not, via his own impassioned piano compositions, have been thinking about the future manifestation of a song like Tetra-Sync, difficult as it would have been in the late eighteen hundreds to predict, from his modest boarding room in Sils Maria, looking out at the lake and the grazing fields, the development of jazz and electronica let alone the fusion of those worlds, but for me this is exactly what the tune is, a dancing star given life through one man's ability to wrap technical mastery around unstable, inventive chaos. The piece has been the primary musical talisman of my adult life as an amateur composer.

The role of being able to perform an instrument with a high degree of technical ability and its relationship with composing innovative and impactful music is unclear. It certainly used to be the case, before the computer age, that to realise the music in your head it was not enough to scribe it on the page. You had to work it out on a piano, to play the notes in sequence. A string of notes on the page is a geometry of logic, it makes sense in relation to how far it abides or transcends formal considerations of music theory, but something radically changes when you actually play the notes, put them physically together and let them bleed into each other to reveal unexpected harmonies.

But even then it was more than being able to just play the notes in a rudimentary manner. It is not a coincidence that the musical giants of the past - think Bach, Beethoven - were virtuoso performers on their instruments. It is surely a bi-directional relationship: it is not the case that all talented musicians will make good composers, nor is it the case that all good composers will be talented musicians, but the duel dialogue that occurs within the mind of someone with the musical ability to both perform in virtuosic ways and relate that capacity towards inventive and impactful compositional ideas is surely a phenomenon.

I say 'inventive and impactful' because there have been examples in recent years, particularly within the corridors of YouTube, of talented performers who know more musical scales than Charles Louis-Hanon (creator of the Hanon exercises known to young pianists the world over) who create technically stunning music that, at least on myself and many of the accompanying comments beneath the videos, make little impact. They don't resonate on a physical level in terms of mixing memory and desire.

Much of the second half of the twentieth century has been moving in the opposite direction, away from technical accomplishments within music towards directly emotional and physical results. Folk singers with off key pitch, the way Bob Dylan teased an interviewer who pointed out that his voice is no Enrico Caruso; wall of sound rock with nonsense lyrics; disco dance beats that fuelled a nightclub economy; rap narratives that read as diary entries of traumatic lives; and, today, a melding of all those elements into endless genre combinations, the age of authenticity meets the computer age, using laptops to create soundtracks, with or without vocals, that seek to make you move and make you cry.

What this has meant, because of this trajectory in the twentieth century towards feeling, arguably the way it is in music after governments failed at protecting the working class from two world wars, turned away from societal collectivism, away from class structures that had set up monarchy fuelled court composers, via the political and personal liberty of blues and jazz, instruments picked up from the ground, op-shop guitars, post-war DIY, village folk music of past centuries returning as solo wolf whistle arias, to where we are now, the folk musicians of the past thirty years growing up with laptops around the campfire glow of their monitors, and now, the peak performance of twenty twenty three so far at the culturally dominant Coachella festival, an electronic dance music performance by a trio of bedroom computer composers using recorded samples of conversations captured via phone cameras and video calls, four to the floor bass drums and eighties synthesizer loops to stir the feet and feelings of millions of participants who were either there or online streaming it from their solitary rooms.

The reason this trio were the headline performers for the second weekend of Coachella is a story in itself that relates directly to what I'm driving at here. Fred Again, Skrillex and Four Tet, the trio who called themselves TBA after the 'to be announced' tag stamped on the Coachella marketing material when booking them as replacement for, the previously intended performer, booked headline act Frank Ocean who had sat on the the main stage on the first weekend and confounded everybody involved. Background rumours aside, what was directly observable was that Frank Ocean sat on a stool on stage and told the crowd he was there in memory of his younger brother who passed away three years prior in a car accident, and that Frank Ocean never enjoyed Coachella, that it was his brother who dragged him out into the dust, and that from that point on the rest of the short headline performance comprised of Frank standing in the shadows at the back of the stage while music played, or while he sat and mimed along to his pre-recorded vocal tracks, or let his DJ play a dance track, or, for rare moments, tried to perform. The fallout was immediate: fans in the audience and, most important these days, online, were ravenously disappointed, consuming all manner of media and accusations to work out what went on - did Frank injure himself before the performance, was he too engulfed with grief to put on a decent show - but nowhere did I see my own interpretation of what happened, which is that perhaps Frank Ocean, along with many in his generation of sensitive, hushed pop star musicians, are just not technically cut out for live music performance in the way we hope they are.

To say that pop musicians are not musically talented is one of the easiest cultural cheap shots, but we can be excused after thirty years of television talent shows, an industry of replicating musical manufacture, and the first time a karaoke microphone was passed around a sake soaked lounge - karaoke, literally 'empty orchestra' in Japanese, a telling historical designation - for still referring to this mode of critique, but only because we are not so much attacking a lack of talent as we are a lack of authenticity: as said, an op-shop acoustic guitar accompanied by DIY political agency can forgive quality of voice and lyric so long as the intention is true. When the intention is mechanically and algorithmically induced, co-written between mixing desk producers, session musicians and focus group Likert scales, we do not forgive the musicality except, the lowest compliment, when we call it a guilty pleasure.

What we have now, though, seems to me a generation of musicians who seek authenticity and genuinely innovative, beautiful compositional ideas but without the virtuosic technical performance credentials to pull it off outside a studio setting, and this is in part because of this rejection of virtuoso, no longer crowding into a concert hall to hear Rachmaninoff's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor with its impossible rhythms and requirement for hands that span wider than the standard deviation of most human limits, but rather a focus on emotionally true music that can be sang naked into an iPhone in the corner of some midnight desk whilst watching the blinking lights of a passenger jet meld with the cosmos.

When Lana Del Rey first performed on Saturday Night Live the fallout was immediate. She had two of the most talked about songs of the season, with accompanying film clips that looked like they were filmed between a grainy webcam and an eight millimetre camera - they were beautiful pieces of pop music, full of big soul and sweeping vocal lines, Video Games particularly calling back to an era of old world ballroom grandeur that has become Del Rey's signature ever since - and yet her future seemed all but cancelled when she tried to sing live. Look up any early live performance by the most awarded young singer of the past five years, Billie Eilish, trying to hit even the most rudimentary notes of Ocean Eyes. It feels gratuitous to say any of this, but I do so with nothing but affection for what they are doing - creating wonderful music via computer that does not translate to live performance, even with all that AutoTune can offer.

This is what I'm gesturing towards when I say that perhaps Frank Ocean was not cut out to be a headline performer, and nor should he have to be. Watching his own Saturday Night Life performances is like watching a friend whisper melodies down a phone call, and even his stadium performances on YouTube reveal a quiet, subtle approach that, when he does reach his voice to hit the occasional strong high note and cause the crowd to cry out in affirmation, we see that this is not Elvis Presley, that the nature of performance is very different now, less about the spectacle of physicality and more about the presentation of raw emotion. But when emotion is so beautifully rendered by way of the glistening annals of software production, how can it stand up to being transmitted to teeming tens of thousands standing in a desert crowd, except via the act that replaced Frank on the second weekend after he elected not to continue, a trio of dance musicians performing straight from the software, directly from the computer, because this is answer to how you deliver emotionally raw and physically inviting music in twenty twenty three: you plug in the aux cable to your software, ensure your internet browsers and spreadsheets are closed, and hit play.

This mode of performance was derided during the nineties when it originated on the electronic music scene. Laptop musicians would sit back in deck chairs while their songs played to the audience, and the Mozart of eletronica, Richard James (Aphex Twin) was quite open about writing e-mails during his live shows. Richard is a thesis unto himself with regards to this dialectic of virtuosic technical performance coming up against authentic emotionally revelation because he has written some of the most technically complicated electronic music of the past thirty years, music that is as emotionally authentic and resonant as any weeping guitar or vocal line of the past century, and yet by his own admission he cannot read, write or play music in any traditional manner. It is this caveat, 'any traditional manner', that gives him his inroads - while Richard James cannot play the piano compositions he writes (he has a laptop connected to a mechanical piano that does this for him) or read the notation of the melodies he sequences (he uses tracker software that reduces stave notation to binary options running vertical down a chart of numbers and letters) he is nonetheless a virtuoso of computer software. This is his instrument, in the same way that The Beatles, having racked up however many tens of thousands of hours of live performance on the road, parked the tour bus in a shed that never opened again and became technical masters of the recording studio, no doubt the progenitors of what we have now, an age of impossible studio compositions that cannot be performed live.

Which makes the case of Tom Jenkinson and Tetra-Sync all the more fascinating to me. This is a musician who is as technically adept as Richard James on the laptop but who is also a virtuoso of traditional performance, calling to mind the benchmark of bass guitar talent of the past century, Jaco Pastorius, to say nothing of his elaborate drum performances that are recorded on Tetra-Sync. And, in the spirit of Nietzsche's dancing star, the music is chaotic, pure, emotionally authentic and elevating.

The way Tom uses a bass guitar is all wrong - he plays it like an acoustic guitar, he hits it like a drum, turning into a tool of melody and percussion, everything bass is not meant to be. He describes being shown a drum machine in the early nineties and how the store employee demonstrated the way it could play a disco beat. When Tom took it home he turned it into a granular synthesizer, pushing bass drum notes together in such quick succession that they turn into a harmonic drone (listen to Journey to Reedham for a fun gut punch demonstrating how drum machine bass samples were never meant to be pushed to such extremes), pitch shifting hi-hats to play bell-like melodic ostinatos, and ultimately inverting the whole mechanics of the device. This could be said too about his whole performance mode, inverting the mechanics of laptop music performance by plugging in his bass guitar and shredding away while maximalist synthesised melodies interpolate with his tones, feeding back on themselves in ways that bring melody, atonality, space and heat into elegiac confrontation.

A piece like Tetra-Sync produces sounds that, by way of their inverted pathways, naturally tap into synaesthesic responses, crossing over sensory responses to colour and textures (round red melodic lines that collapse into angular, folding concessions when notes bend beyond the range of physical circuitry, airlifted into gradients only permissible by software arbitrated by human hands) that give rise to deep seeded emotional responses informed by just-out-of-view memories. It is authentic by way of transgressing direct emotional pathways.

Tom Jenkinson won't be headlining Coachella anytime soon, and nor would it suit him or his music anymore than I doubt those performance spots suit our current generation of popular mumblecore music performers. Festival crowds want to move, YouTube audiences want to feel, and the musical elitists among us want to be reminded of what happens when musical virtuosity connects with the twin technologies of our era - computer software and human emotion - and the sensory pleasures that result.