Squarepusher – “K2 Central” Review

Thirty years deep into his practice, Tom Jenkinson releases a single that sounds like an orchestra arguing with itself at high speed. Kammerkonzert is coming. The opening move is already disorienting.

There’s a particular tension in Tom Jenkinson’s work between precision and volatility — the sense that at any moment, the structure could detonate. “K2 Central,” the lead single from Kammerkonzert, Squarepusher’s sixteenth studio album due April 10 on Warp Records, is built almost entirely from that tension. Four minutes and twenty-four seconds that feel both rigorously assembled and perpetually on the verge of collapse.

The Concept Behind the Record

Kammerkonzert — the title is German for “chamber concert” — has an origin story that stretches back nearly a decade. Jenkinson began developing the project around 2016, originally intending to collaborate with a professional chamber ensemble. What he found was that conventional orchestras couldn’t execute the rhythmic and textural specificity his compositions required, particularly the kind of muscular, syncopated momentum he describes as “funk.” A wrist fracture sustained in Norway in 2018 and the pandemic years further complicated any possibility of ensemble work. The result is an album Jenkinson recorded almost entirely solo, playing every part himself — a chamber work with no chamber, or rather, one in which the chamber is entirely internal.

What “K2 Central” Does

The track opens with a kind of compressed, almost hydraulic energy — melodic fragments cycling at speed before the architecture declares itself. Jenkinson layers riff-driven structures with orchestral thematic writing in a way that refuses to resolve neatly into either category. There are moments of progressive rock logic, passages that suggest Zeuhl-influenced rhythmic density (the shadow of Magma is not hard to trace), and a handling of harmonic complexity that feels closer to baroque counterpoint than to anything contemporary electronic music typically reaches for. The track is credited to Squarepusher and Tom Jenkinson as composers, with Jenkinson as sole producer and mixing engineer.

At 4:24, it functions as a kind of compressed manifesto: this is not ambient work, nor is it the hyper-speed drum and bass of Jenkinson’s early Warp years. It lands somewhere between those poles and refuses to be comfortable there.

Context and Lineage

Warp Records has been Jenkinson’s home since the mid-1990s, and Kammerkonzert arrives as catalogue release WARPDA417 — a figure that quietly underscores just how long this particular artist-label relationship has sustained. His most recent studio album before this was Dostrotime in March 2024. Kammerkonzert pushes further: the full tracklist spans fourteen tracks, moving from K1 through K14, each numbered sequentially. The architecture is deliberate. “K2 Central” is track two — a statement piece positioned immediately after the opener.

The music video, directed by Jo Apps with type design by Sean Kuhnke, was released February 24, 2026. The visual design echoes the album artwork’s typographic severity: blocky sans-serif letters, a graphic coldness that matches the structural rigor of the music without aestheticizing it into decoration.

Why It Matters

What makes “K2 Central” worth attention isn’t that it sounds experimental in a self-congratulatory way — it doesn’t. It sounds like someone who has spent thirty years developing a particular musical language and is now using it with total command and minimal compromise. The single draws from sources — Magma, Weather Report, Morricone’s baroque soundscapes — that most producers operating in electronic music either don’t know or deliberately obscure. Jenkinson doesn’t obscure them. He builds with them in plain sight, which is its own kind of confidence.

Kammerkonzert is due April 10, 2026 on Warp Records. “K2 Central” suggests an album that knows exactly what it is, even if it takes several listens to pin down what that actually means.