Kammerkonzert

Kammerkonzert

The essential hook of Tom Jenkinson’s brain-bendingly intricate machine music is the reminder that it’s made by people, an approach that has always made him feel more aligned with the playful elitism of Frank Zappa and Conlon Nancarrow than the populism of the club. Thirty years after his 1996 breakthrough Feed Me Weird Things comes Kammerkonzert, a pseudo-orchestral suite that shifts between slapstick collisions of harpsichord and percussion (“K10 Terminus”), his now-trademark prog-electro-jazz (“K2 Central”), and clouds of dissonance that hover beautifully and uneasily in dead space (“K5 Fremantle,” “K11 Tideway”). Cerebral, yes, always—but also in on the joke.