Ufabulum, good, bad or meh?

its the best thing hes made since ultravisitor.

great stuff.

  On 10/20/2012 at 1:47 AM, Smettingham Rutherford IV said:

its the best thing hes made since ultravisitor.

 

 

great stuff.

Agreed

Just bought the 5 trax from ufabulum that were reworked for the KCRW dealy...

http://warp.net/records/squarepusher/kcrw-session-and-live-dates

yeah the kcrw tracks are kind of neat, i'm going to go ahead and buy them. some of the changes seem random and pointless but some are pretty cool and impressive manipulations.

  On 10/20/2012 at 10:41 PM, MisterE said:

yeah the kcrw tracks are kind of neat, i'm going to go ahead and buy them. some of the changes seem random and pointless but some are pretty cool and impressive manipulations.

I listened to it all the way through and was kind of disappointed. The manipulations are too mechanical/ occur a preset amount of seconds apart.

never touched it again since

Hello... I still love it... Sometimes I prefer one half over the other; sometimes Ecstatic Shock is my favorite, sometimes Stadium Ice, and others Energy Wizard. They are big choonz, and I love em'. The only song I don't listen to very often is Unreal Square... It's not my cup of tea, but nothing wrong with that... I like cheese... Smedley's Medley for example...

I still listen to it regularly.

It's awesome, and I can't wait to see what he does next

sounds so good in my truck, scares farmers and cows i drive by.

listened to it on headphones out and about today and it was enjoyable

  On 10/25/2012 at 11:20 PM, cloud capture said:

sounds so good in my truck, scares farmers and cows i drive by.

lol

Been hammering this the last couple of days. It's much more of a rewarding listen than I remember. The detail in the production is astonishing. On a good system with the volume up I can well understand the person up-thread saying he feels like it's Tom's best work. Without wanting to get too wanky about it, it kinda feels like each sound has been precision-machined out of adamantium or some shit. The sound has this weight to it, so it never feels as flighty as some of his previous work but once a track builds up a head of steam it just feels beastly.

I still think Unreal Square hurts the album a bit (switch it out with Panic Massive and you're really cooking - got so much love for that tune), but the rest of the tracks really stand up to intense scrutiny and repeat listening. This is what I love about Squarepusher; you can return to his stuff months or years later and just be delighted by new facets of his craftsmanship that previously escaped your attention.

In conclusion, I fucking love you, Tom. :-)

  On 10/20/2012 at 10:50 PM, Kanakori said:

never touched it again since

  On 12/5/2012 at 11:24 AM, Lucy Faringold said:

Been hammering this the last couple of days. It's much more of a rewarding listen than I remember. The detail in the production is astonishing. On a good system with the volume up I can well understand the person up-thread saying he feels like it's Tom's best work. Without wanting to get too wanky about it, it kinda feels like each sound has been precision-machined out of adamantium or some shit. The sound has this weight to it, so it never feels as flighty as some of his previous work but once a track builds up a head of steam it just feels beastly.

 

I still think Unreal Square hurts the album a bit (switch it out with Panic Massive and you're really cooking - got so much love for that tune), but the rest of the tracks really stand up to intense scrutiny and repeat listening. This is what I love about Squarepusher; you can return to his stuff months or years later and just be delighted by new facets of his craftsmanship that previously escaped your attention.

i agree with the adamantium comment. it's a very cold and sort of metallic sound, very unlike any of this other stuff.

i just really don't see what's so bad about Unreal Square. I guess it might be one of the 'weaker' tracks, but i don't see it as a bad track at all. it has the same type of detailed production and similar sounds to the rest of the disc. the synth strings are incredible, at least. if peoples' big complaint is with the couple instances of growling dubstep-like bass, or the chiptune melody, to me that's just a bit of an over-reaction. he's done both in the past, before either things were really big.

to me the weakest part of the track is when it gets hectic. it's just not as good hectivity as the other tracks that do that.

should i trademark that word, hectivity?

Listened to it once, then a few songs here or there. I guess I only like his really poppy work. The technicality of this album is impressive, like much of his catalog, but this one didn't rub me right.

The mastering is god awful, you shouldn't have to run it through a gigantic system to sound good. Even my friend who doesn't like electronic music much said he though the tracks were cool, but grating to listen to for long periods of time.

Dark Steering could be the best SP track ever if he took out that fucking crotch rocket sound that takes up a huge part of the mix and shortened it by like 2 minutes.

I can't stand the bitcrusher wah-wah shit

I don't like the oppressively digital sound of the record in general

but I like the rhythmic harmonic melodic content

  On 12/6/2012 at 4:13 AM, LimpyLoo said:

I don't like the oppressively digital sound of the record in general

 

ya know i kind of agree with this. on one hand i think it's cool because it sets it apart from his others in that way, but on the other hand it makes it seem like it had its soul sucked out of it or something. like it's been assimilated by the borg. if somehow he could have worked just a little warmth in there to anchor it, but still keep the spacey/sci-fi vibe...

My biggest letdown of 2012. The first 4 tracks are okay, but rest is just worthless in my opinion. I honestly had way more fun with both Shobaleader and Just A Souvenir.

I haven't completely lost faith in him just yet. Numbers Lucent is still one of my favorite things ever made, and that was relatively recently.

oh.. and Red In Blue and The Metallurgist are worst tracks he has ever made.

Haters gonna whaaat?....

Haters gon' respectfully disagree

lol

I like the whole vibe of it, but it doesn't really have that 'pusher sound to me. Seems like a lot of little ideas and touches were missed that could have been exploited, and the whole lack of bass freqs it's really weird, kinda like Ded Mows' engineering. Some pretty melodies, here and there, but kinda just like a nice edm album, not really groundbreaking. And that out-of-time bit from 2:49 on Unreal Square is just weird.

  On 1/23/2013 at 1:22 PM, FinePrimitiveSounds said:

I like the whole vibe of it, but it doesn't really have that 'pusher sound to me. Seems like a lot of little ideas and touches were missed that could have been exploited, and the whole lack of bass freqs it's really weird, kinda like Ded Mows' engineering. Some pretty melodies, here and there, but kinda just like a nice edm album, not really groundbreaking. And that out-of-time bit from 2:49 on Unreal Square is just weird.

Yeah the out of time cheese synth solo is just lol. Unreal Square, 4001 and dark steering are very irritating because of their repetitive trance chord cheese. I have high hopes for his next release though. I am certain we will hear some new material in march!

metallurgist is one of the top 3 tracks on the album for me

just listenined to stadium ice and I was just like 'woah!' a la pitchfork review quote 'Individual tracks can still induce a "whoa!" response from unsuspecting listeners'

I'm come around a bit on this album.

I still think some of the elements won't age well (like the bitcrusher wah-wah stuff)

  On 12/6/2012 at 9:45 AM, LimpyLoo said:

Haters gon' respectfully disagree

lol!