Tom Jenkinson started writing music for orchestra in 2016. Ten years later he released it, having played almost all of it himself, because the two obvious ways of getting it recorded were both closed off.
Kammerkonzert came out on 10 April through Warp, running sixty-two minutes and forty-three seconds. It is the seventeenth Squarepusher album and the first built on strings, horns and woodwinds rather than on programmed drums.
Two Obstacles, One Solution
The sequence of problems is what makes the record what it is. Jenkinson workshopped his orchestral material with professional musicians and was not satisfied with the outcome — which is the normal first failure for a producer moving into notated composition.
Then the covid pandemic stopped large groups of people gathering, removing the option of trying again with a bigger ensemble.
Then a wrist injury stopped him playing bass guitar, which for Squarepusher is not a peripheral instrument. His reputation as a player rests substantially on it, and losing it removes the thing he would ordinarily fall back on.
What remained was recording everything himself. That is a strange way to arrive at an orchestral album, and it explains the specific character of the result: a chamber record made by someone with a producer’s tools rather than a conductor’s.
The technical problem in doing that is real. Orchestral music depends on ensemble — players listening to each other, adjusting intonation and timing in the moment — and a person overdubbing parts alone gets none of that. Every entry has to be placed rather than felt.
What a producer has instead is total control of the balance. Nothing is buried by a section playing too loud, nothing is compromised by a room, and every line can be positioned exactly where the composer wants it. Those are opposite virtues, and the record trades one set for the other.
It is also worth noting how long the whole thing took. From the first orchestral sketches in 2016 to release in 2026 is a decade, most of it spent on a project that had no obvious route to completion.
What It Actually Sounds Like
The record has been described as chamber, electronic, IDM and jazz at once, built from multi-layered orchestral composition rather than the drill ‘n’ bass his catalogue is known for. Strings, horns, woodwinds and live drums recur throughout.
Bill Pearis at BrooklynVegan heard 1970s jazz fusion in it, and critics have picked out influences ranging from Ennio Morricone to Frank Zappa, Brian Eno and the French band Magma — a set of reference points with almost nothing in common except ambition and a refusal to sit inside one form.
The individual tracks show how the two halves of his method meet. “K2 Central” pairs a slow electro-funk drum machine rhythm with bass guitar, live and programmed drums, and string arrangements; one reviewer called it “the musical heart of the record” and “a protagonist’s theme”.
“K4 Fairlands” moves from breakbeat drums and creeping strings into synthesiser sequences, in what one critic described as “Jenkinson’s past bleeds into his present as timpani turn into squelchy beats and French horns give way to an 8-bit wall of sound”.
“K7 Museum” is a “berserk seven-minute prog-fusion instrumental” using harpsichord and mallet percussion, said to crescendo “with such compositional acuity that it borders on showstopping”.
Mozart Over Drum and Bass
The clearest illustration of the album’s method is “K10 Terminus”, described as head-spinning and irresistibly perky, which sets orchestral writing compared to Mozart over drum and bass percussion.
That combination sounds like a joke and is not one. Both traditions are built on rapid subdivision and rhythmic precision, and the reason the pairing works is structural rather than novel.
“K13 Vigilant” applies the logic the other way, replacing hi-hats with sequenced glockenspiels — an orchestral instrument doing a drum machine’s job rather than the reverse.
These are the decisions of somebody thinking in both languages at once, which very few people can. It is also why recording it alone may have been the right accident: an orchestra would have played the notes, but not necessarily heard where the breakbeat logic was hiding inside them. Our piece on why club music repeats so much covers the structural habit this record is working against.
Thirty Years on the Same Label
The context for all this is unusual longevity. Jenkinson signed to Warp in December 1995 and has stayed, releasing acclaimed records including Hard Normal Daddy and Ultravisitor across three decades.
Thirty years with one label is close to unheard of in electronic music, where artists typically move between imprints as their sound shifts. It also explains how an album like this gets released at all.
A sixty-two-minute orchestral record from an artist known for drill ‘n’ bass is a difficult proposition for any label that has not spent thirty years learning what he does. Warp’s whole identity is built on backing exactly that kind of turn.
The relationship cuts both ways. An artist who has never had to argue for a record has no reason to soften one, and a catalogue built without that pressure looks different from one shaped by successive A&R conversations at successive labels.
The track titles are a small symptom of the same freedom. “K2 Central”, “K4 Fairlands”, “K7 Museum”, “K10 Terminus”, “K13 Vigilant” — numbered like movements rather than named like songs, on a record where the numbering is not even sequential across the release.
Kammerkonzert follows Dostrotime from 2024, which is a short gap for a project this involved — though the orchestral writing had been accumulating since 2016, so the recording window and the composition window are not the same thing.
A Quiet Release for a Loud Record
The campaign was modest. The album was announced on 25 February 2026 alongside the first single “K2 Central”, with a video by Jo Apps. A second single, “K7 Museum”, followed on 18 March with its own video, and the album arrived on vinyl and CD on 10 April.
Bundles with an exclusive print were also offered, which is the standard way an artist with a committed audience converts attention into physical sales without a wider campaign.
Six weeks from announcement to release, two singles and no attempt to explain the change of direction in advance is a confident handling. It treats the record as something to be encountered rather than prepared for.
The reception justified it. The album was received positively, with four out of five from AllMusic among the notices, and reviewers broadly treating the orchestral turn as an extension of his method rather than an abandonment of it.
That framing matters more than the scores. An artist who moves into orchestral writing late is usually read as leaving something behind — trading the thing that made them for a more respectable form. The critical response here did the opposite, hearing the same rhythmic intelligence applied to different instruments.
The comparison one reviewer reached for, to his 1998 record Music Is Rotted One Note, supports that. That album was itself a jazz-leaning departure made largely by Jenkinson playing instruments rather than programming them, which makes this less a new direction than a return to one he has taken before.
Ten years from first sketch to release, with two of the three obvious routes blocked along the way. On the evidence, the obstacles shaped the record more usefully than the original plan would have.
Kammerkonzert is out now on Warp Records.
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