Artist: Squarepusher Album: 'Ultravisitor' Label: Warp Records Web site: www.Warp-Net.com Listen:   1) 'Iambic 9 Poetry' • More Reviews | More Music • Talk Music

As a bass player and programmer of drum samples, Thomas Jenkinson, aka Squarepusher, is a virtuoso who knows exactly what he's doing. But as a synthesist, that is, someone who can turn his love of jazz, electronica and avant-gardes of all stripes into a coherent musical narrative -- he prefers playing hide and seek to letting us pin a tale on him.

His seventh album, "Ultravisitor," is more of the same: moments of quietude interrupted by outbursts of attention-getting virtuosity. Oases of tranquility shattered into a million fragments. Rest, in pieces.

Yet even though listeners who weren't raised on video games might find Jenkinson's restlessness wearying, there's more going on here than the aural equivalent of attention deficit disorder. "Ultravisitor" is one of Jenkinson's most extreme albums; the collision of gabba-tempo breakbeats, Jaco Pastorius-style bass runs and oceanic keyboard washes is as rudely constructed as ever. But that abruptness seems purposeful and deeply felt. Jenkinson's taste for discord, "Ultravisitor" insists, isn't a spit-take. On tracks like "Iambic 9 Poetry," "Menelec" and "Terra-Sync," nostalgia, jitteriness, terror and foreboding are coiled around each other so tightly they define an emotional state so singular you won't find it in the DSM-IV. Like, say, Dostoevsky or Mingus (though he's not artistically in a league with either of them), Jenkinson possesses a sensitivity so outsized that looking for shapeliness or proportion in his music is beside the point.

Some artists are all about synthesis and resolution; others simply manage to give voice to an irreducible individuality. There's only one Squarepusher, and on "Ultravisitor" he bares his neuroses in all their ragged, prismatic glory.

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