What Squarepusher does on any given album can be boiled down to an elevator pitch—one that, admittedly, flattens the dizzying complexity of his music even as it reveals how consistent the underlying model has become. The approach rarely changes, but it hardly needs to when, more than 30 years into his career, Thomas Russell Jenkinson remains something of a genre unto himself: IDM that, at its best, approximates the controlled yet seemingly slapped-together energy of free jazz. Call it FruityLoops-core.
Kammerkonzert comes closest to that platonic ideal as Squarepusher has gotten in some time, forgoing the more tech-heavy elements that defined 2020’s Be Up a Hello in favor of orchestral-lite arrangements. Across much of the album’s 14 tracks, we’re subjected to a headrush of furiously programmed instrumental panoply: Fortepiano runs fly by, while woodland instruments are deployed with equal velocity on tracks such as “K10 Terminus,” which plays like Mozart trying his hand at conducting a drum-‘n’-bass symphony. Even the album’s more quietly intricate moments, like “K5 Fremantle,” never quite settle into calm, with plucked and bowed strings colliding as repeated piano motifs take the place of a traditional breakbeat.
The question, as ever with late-period Squarepusher, is how much of this is genuine evolution and how much is increasingly elaborate restatement. Save for a new instrumental palette—Squarepusher’s biggest leftfield move since 1998’s nu-jazz Music Is Rotted One Note—things aren’t all that different. Hearing a perfectly sequenced run of glockenspiels in place of hi-hats on “K13 Vigilant” is novel, but it’s merely a swap of texture, not ideas. Kammerkonzert is ultimately a Squarepusher album sporting a slightly different hat.
Still, there are worse things to be subjected to than hearing a master of his craft work through yet another permutation of his signature sound. The Zappa-esque “K7 Museum,” for one, crescendos with such compositional acuity that it borders on showstopping. Like Kammerkonzert as a whole, it’s nothing Squarepusher hasn’t done before, but it’s rendered with the polish and executed with the ease of an artist who knows exactly how to make it land.
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