Squarepusher - Kammerkonzert Review

A dense, playful and often disorienting dive into Squarepusher’s self-styled “chamber music,” where virtuosity and experimentation collide in a digital orchestra that rewards patience as much as it resists it.

The relationship with your favourite band or musician can be one of the most enduring of a lifetime. Often forged in the crucible of the teenage years, and running long into adulthood, they outlast many romantic partners, and in some cases all but the deepest of friendships. My relationship with the music of Tom Jenkinson goes back much further than my marriage, and to apply an old cliche, you could argue that as far as Squarepusher’s music is concerned anyway, just like a marriage: it’s as much about what you put in, as what you get out of it.

And I’ve certainly put in the hours with Jenkinson’s catalogue over the years. A virtuoso musician, technological innovator and restless explorer of genres, his experiments with hyperactive drill’n’bass, live jazz fusion, and cartoonish EDM-style theatrics have delighted, dazzled and at times frustrated me over the years. He’s consistently refined and reinvented his sound to the point where for every new Squarepusher album, you never truly know what you’re going to get, except that it will sound like Squarepusher and no one else.  

So what’s in the box this time? The press photo of Tom sitting in an auditorium wearing a loosely knotted neck-scarf and wry facial expression, and the album’s German translation, ‘Chamber Concert’ provide some clues. This is not a return to the 200 BPM micro-edited acid breakbeats of 2024’s Dostrotime, nor does it seem likely Tom will be donning the LED fencing masks of the Shobaleader tour. Instead we have… Squarepusher plays Chamber Music?

A style traditionally played in the chambers of great palaces by a small group of musicians reacting to one another, to create a fluid and dynamic dialogue. And from the impressive array of instrumentation displayed on Kammerkonzert, it sounds as if Squarepusher has enlisted his own band of skilled players. But look again and they all have the face of Tom Jenkinson. So while we have live drums, occasionally supplemented by tasteful adornments of programmed beats, and of course Squarepusher’s calling card, the live bass guitar; the orchestral instruments, the giddy strings, jovial harpsichord and tinkling glockenspiels to name just a few, are all MIDI-triggered. A digital band of musicians in a knotty and at times, seemingly impenetrable, dialogue with one another.

On the first few listens to Kammerkonzert, I struggled to find a way in. But as the pieces began to distinguish themselves and my ears adjusted to the…let’s say “baroque” sound palette, it's revealed itself to be an immensely playful and at times joyful record. One could picture the experience as that of watching a band of insanely talented musicians, in absolute lockstep with one another, just playing their hearts out in the chamber of some mad emperor. The frantic density of tracks like K10 Terminus or K4 Fairlands, for example would be the players obeying a behest to squeeze as many notes and about-turns into as short a passage as possible. 

Another way to approach Kammerkonzert is as the soundtrack to an imaginary film. Yes that gets said about countless albums, but it genuinely applies here. All the pieces are structured in such a linear fashion; sure there are repeating refrains and motifs, but everything is executed in the manner of a narrative, which the mind irresistibly wants to interpret as an unfolding chain of events. Whatever the film may be, it only exists in the unhinged imagination of Tom Jenkinson. Possibly a black and white heist flick featuring a giant robot possessed by the spirit of Frank Zappa. 

Dropping K2 Central as the lead single was surely intended to reel fans in, given it’s the most typically-sounding Squarepusher cut here. Leading with funky bass guitar, embellished with tasteful drum machines, live flourishes of percussion and acoustic instrumentation, it builds to the kind layered climax that Jenkinson has been deploying to devastating effect for years - and provides the intro for the movie’s urbane protagonist (perhaps wearing a loosely knotted scarf and wry expression).

On K3 Diligence, a grumbling misanthrope enters stage left, signalled by the low rumble of some kind of wind-instrument (or are they strings?). But K4 Fairlands is where the action really kicks off, the record’s only inclusion of edited breakbeats pursues uneasy strings that rise in intensity; surely a high-stakes chase scene if ever there was one, with jittery pizzicato plucks marking every footfall along a collapsing cliff-edge.

Following a moody midsection, K7 Museum opens act two in more jaunty fashion, transporting you fully back to the late Baroque period (with Frank Zappa playing the character of Bach). But swap out the clavichord for a 303, and the jazz drumming for a breakbeat, and this could be a classic Squarepusher acid jam, reimagined for the 18th century. This will no doubt be divisive, even for the Squarepusher faithful, but it's the final portion of the record from K10 Terminus to K13 Vigilant, providing the jeopardy-defying climax to our fictional movie, and which is the most challenging. On a graph that plots technical brilliance against an x axis of “enjoyable to listen to”, this is perhaps the lowest point of the curve. Despite this, it’s impossible not to admire the ambition of the Kammerkonzert project.

Time and again, Tom Jenkinson has set himself new challenges and redefined the parameters of what constitutes a Squarepusher album. Whether it was eschewing samples and sequencers to create an album of analogue jazz fusion on Music is Rotted One Note, or programming his own music production and performance software for Damogen Furies. While the synthesis of acoustic instruments with digital programming has always been part of the remit, the way it’s deployed on Kammerkonzert feels like something new. And this is what's most impressive about Kammerkonzert, aside from the musicality and compositional wizardry, that Tom Jenkinson has managed to create a Squarepusher album that doesn't sound like Squarepusher.