Feed ME Weird Things Tom!

I shall say it: Listening to Squarepusher is an activity I find generally preferable to listenening to Autechre. I think it's the fact that Tom is interested in making songs with more traditional elements such as melodies and themes that appeals to me. I think too that Squarepusher has achieved a much more complete union of traditional techniques and technology in his work. And he plays a mean bass.

Feed Me Weird Things is still a work in progress in the sense that I don't think SP was fully realised at that stage. There are a few tracks which run a touch too long, and don't shine the way some of his later stuff does, but it's hard to complain when your ass is being kicked with Squarepusher's Theme, or Theme From Ernest Borgnine. It would be quite rude to really.

But!
Hard Normal Daddy.
HARD. NORMAL. DADDY.
(!)
This album was my first exposure to IDM, I remember getting it in Brighton back in something like '99? At first I was a bit underwhelmed, the drums seemed too thin, they lacked the punch of other stuff I was listening to at the time, like ATR and NIN. I was also well into the rave scene by that point, and it was much less obvious than the DnB that I liked so much (Hello there, Goldie, how's the wife and kids?).
I kept at it though, and gradually the album unveiled itself before me. I'd never heard acid before, and certainly never paired with bass that funky. The sweet melodies of Beep Street were nearly permanently on my stereo.
This is to say that HND is good. It's better than good. 10 years isn't enough time to call something a classic, I don't think 20 is, but this is a discussion worth considering in 2023 or so.
And here's the weird thing - I was listening to it now for the first time in quite a while, and I have passed through much more of the classical canon of techno, and the thing that I really feel when I hear HND is how Tom was doing the same thing with a lot of rave genres that Tortoise was doing with rock. His acid isn't straight up acid, it's more like a reference to the acid idea, that he's fused with all of his other ideas...this CD somehow sounds like it could be new, in the way it isn't tied to the prevailing styles of the time the way most albums are.