In 2002, the electronic musician born Tom Jenkinson released his sixth studio album, Do You Know Squarepusher. That record’s mix of hardcore drum and bass, queasy acid house, and aleatory industrial, plus a surprisingly faithful cover of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” suggested that the answer was “Probably not.” More than two decades later, Squarepusher has remained hard to pin down. He’s played with a full band of masked, pseudonymous players, released an album of solo electric bass, and composed music for a robot band. Stylistically, he’s veered into such complementary and divergent styles as funk, jazz, ambient, electro-soul, and musique concréte. His last album, 2024’s Dostrotime, essentially threw all that together with the pituitary-pounding tempos and aggressive programming of classic Squarepusher, creating a kind of maximalist career summation. Kammerkonzert, perhaps unsurprisingly, consists of something entirely different. While diehard Squarepusher fans won’t be disappointed, they might want to be prepared.
Perhaps that’s why Squarepusher named the album Kammerkonzert, a German word meaning “chamber concert”—so the symphonic sound palette wouldn’t come as too much of a shock. Opener “K1 Advance” (the tracks are presented in alphabetical order) charts the new direction, with a barrage of strings, vibraphone, woodwinds, and other less easily identifiable sounds—Glockenspiel? Bassoon?—playing short, alternating phrases. The beat, provided by live drums, lurches and lumbers, following the knotty runs of notes instead of setting up a pulse. It’s an enigmatic track, decidedly modernist classical, but not academic. It would be whimsical if it weren’t so heavy-footed and direct. “K3 Diligence” treads the same turf, with brief overlapping repeated motifs pushing against an awkward, stop-start tempo, but enlivened with snappier snare rolls. Still, there’s a cul-de-sac quality to it, a gathering of energy that never gets released. Some of that might come down to the nature of the instrumentation —though the rhythm section is analog, the orchestral sounds are all digital, triggered via a MIDI-guitar setup. This allows Squarepusher the freedom and flexibility to paint with a variety of colors, but too much leeway can result in a lack of flow—think of the glassy stiltedness of the Grateful Dead’s MIDI years in the ’90s.
Kammerkonzert works best when fully leaning into that artificiality, as on the piano study “K5 Fremantle,” which contrasts eerie drones and pizzicato plucks to unsettling effect, or setting it against an earthy groove like that of the harpsichord-and-slap-bass workout “K7 Museum,” which sounds like Mozart covering Amandla-era Miles Davis and is the undeniable banger of the album. There are a few vintage Squarepusher moments for EDM old heads as well: “K2 Central” is a slippery bass number that continues to show Jenkinson as the most surprising adherent of fusion titans Weather Report, and “K4 Fairlands” and “K10 Terminus” have the sprightly cymbal pulse and bustling tempo of the dance floor. But as concluding track “K14 Welbeck,” a meditative rhapsody for pipe organ that recalls Keith Jarrett, makes clear, Kammerkonzert is for the fans who’ve never met a Squarepusher they haven’t liked.
