Jazz /
Grzybnia
On Grzybnia, Błoto return from a three‑year silence with their most concept‑driven set yet: a darkly glowing, mycelium‑inspired tangle of jazz, house and techno pulses, where four players improvise like a single underground network branching in all directions.
Grzyby
On Grzyby, Błoto complete their mycelium cycle with a compact blast of medicinal‑and‑toxic club jazz: five mushroom‑named cuts of broken beats, sub‑heavy low end and live improvisation that argue for dialogue and interdependence in a world addicted to walls.
California Space Craft
Yuvi Havkin aka Rejoicer returns with an exceptional collaborative album, California Space Craft. On this aptly titled record, he joins forces with seasoned LA bass polymath Sam Wilkes — known for his inspired studio work with Sam Gendel and his dynamic live performances alongside Louis Cole and Knower — and drummer Tamir Barzilay, completing the LA-connected trifecta alongside a select handful of key featured guests. The idea for California Space Craft was born out of a series of inspired live …
Kwasy I Zasady
What do jazz improvisation, Polish Radio, dingy rap from Memphis, cassette tapes, trap, drill elements and hip-hop loops have in common? These are the ingredients that the Błoto quartet used in their lab to cook an explosive mixture for their third LP entitled “Kwasy i zasady” (eng,“Acids and bases”). Nobody thought that a band who appeared suddenly and unexpectedly on the jazz scene would develop so rapidly and in such an unforeseen direction. A year ago, critics and music journalists treated …
vd5
Vladislav Delay, primarily known as a highly regarded electronic music innovator, steps ahead with his acoustic jazz quintet. Echoing the forward-looking vd musical vision always ahead of the curve, the new album does not fit into any specific category, forging a path of its own across the 10 tracks. Recorded at Candybomber Studio in Berlin, the album brings vd together with Maria Bertel, Lucio Capece, Derek Shirley and Max Loderbauer. This is shape-shifting, elastic music that exists left of an…
Mast Year
The first song cycle collaboration by this new partnership is a highly adventurous and ambitious work, and one which explores a journey through dark places expressed in an improvisation-based language of strange sounds and textures, plus some unexpected left turns into electronic and choral music, before emerging from the woodland and into the morning light. I make a lot of records. In fact most years I release more albums than I make live performances. But this one is special to me in many ways…
Zmiany / Schimbări
Błoto has never cared much for dominant aesthetics. Instead, the band has consistently chosen paths less travelled, unexplored territories and uncharted routes where experimentation is not so much a conscious decision as a natural state of being. After years of a rather hermetic approach to recording their albums, the time for change has come. A trip to Bucharest and the opportunity to collaborate with the community of musicians associated with the underground label Future Nuggets, led by Ion D,…
Devotional Fade
Matt Gold and Dustin Laurenzi present Devotional Fade, a collaborative record of electroacoustic rhythmic improvisations – equal parts meditation and dance, released on We Jazz Records, 24th April. Laurenzi and Gold, key collaborators in the Chicago creative scene and with genre spanning artists such as Bill Callahan and Makaya McCraven, step forward here with a major artistic statement, a product of extended improv sessions capturing the duo's hypnotic interplay. This is the sound of two of Chi…
Actionreaction 2
On Actionreaction 2, Pippo Lionni, Sergio Corbini and Stefano Franceschini turn the studio into a single, improvising organism, where spackle knives and rollers become percussion, free‑jazz piano and sax tangle with electronics, and each canvas is written twice – in sound and in paint.
Vesper Sparrow
The work of JJJJJerome Ellis lives comfortably in the gaps between silence and possibility. The Black disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist creates atmospheric soundscapes with saxophone, organ, hammered dulcimer, electronics, and their voice. Improvisation is at the core of their artistry – often chipping away at large slabs of recordings to reveal the piece like a marble sculptor. It’s an expansive and interdisciplinary practice that allows JJJJJerome to adapt to any medium or form, incl…
Tsuki?
Kin Gajo is a Brussels based electro-acoustic jazz trio drawing inspiration on the one hand from J Dilla and Flying Lotus, and on the other from the sound of British jazz artists such as The Comet Is Coming, Yusef Dayes, and Alfa Mist. With their atypical instrumentation-accordion, saxophone, and drums-the trio has developed a sound entirely of their own, with the accordion often resembling a heavy analog synthesizer.
DJ and producer Lefto featured Kin Gajo on his compilation Lefto Presents Jazz…
No Longer, Not Yet
In November 1926, Tina Modotti wrote: “I accept the tragic conflict between life continuously changing its form, and also immutably fixing it in time.” “No longer, not yet”, the second album from the Italian band “She’s Analog”, is an “instant film” that pretentiously tries to stop movement. The title refers to a zone of transit, in which everything unfolds and blooms. This space isn’t interpreted as exclusively musical; instead it represents that liminal space in which we move and create, both …
Tremor
"Silva has created what could perhaps best be described as “ambient jazz”. That in itself seems like a contradiction, ambient being at odds with the spontaneity of jazz, and jazz being so vivid. But here we are. It’s partly the texture of the musical sounds that merits comparisons with jazz - far from the purely electronic soundscapes of Eno, early Tangerine Dream etcetera. Rather than tone and atmosphere over musical structure and rhythm, this is tone, atmosphere, musical structure and rhythm. …
Elephant
*400 copies limited edition* Brooklyn-born trumpeter and composer Adam O’Farrill, hailed as a leading light of the new American jazz scene, announces his bold new quartet project Elephant. With this ensemble, O’Farrill expands his sonic language into a fresh, genre-blurring space that fuses the intimacy of the jazz quartet with the emotional depth of 20th‑century minimalism and the rhythmic urgency of contemporary electronic and dance music.
Elephant features a powerful lineup: O’Farrill on trum…
Zawsze coś
*100 copies limited edition* "Ben Bekele does not exist. At least not the one I'm thinking of. It's a mix of memories and fantasies from the mid-80s when it was my father who visited Ethiopia, returning with two small drums, a couple of pictures and tons of tales. One of them was a story of a boy named Bekele, who taught him a traditional Ethiopian song.
Father passed this song on to us, as best as he could - now I'm having doubts as to what the message is actually about - but back then I was fa…
A Semblance: Of Return
With A Semblance: Of Return, South African drummer, composer, and bandleader Asher Gamedze gathers a close ensemble of longtime collaborators to explore what he calls “practices of assembly” - ways of coming together, making sound, and imagining new and old modes of freedom. Based in the independent music scenes of Cape Town and rooted in Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness, Of Return extends the political and musical commitments that have defined Gamedze’s work since Dialectic Soul (On The C…
Same
Combining as the Yatha Bhuta Jazz Combo this LP may be a surprise to followers of Onra, while Buddy Sativa will be known to some via his own 2011 jazz leaning LP "Deus Ex Machina" on Favorite Records. There they collaborated on their first jazz track - "Indica". Pleased with the results they carried on, keeping it simple and adhering to straightforward play-more-jazz stylings they have crafted this LP over sessions sandwiched between their assorted commitments over the last two years. Opening th…
The Man In Me / Dark Star
*100 copies limited edition* "Will and I have been playing together for a very long time and in a lot of very different contexts. Our musical history goes back to playing basements and art galleries in Providence in 2008, wanders through a years-long informal residency playing as a sax and guitar duo in Bushwick and Ridgewood, and brings us up to just last week when Will joined Taper’s Choice at a sold out Brooklyn Bowl to celebrate Relix Magazine’s 50th anniversary—more on that again later. In …
Journey On Az Ma'ar Moon
The Selenites Band - Journey on Az Ma'ar Moon An Ethiofuturist odyssey. With Journey on Az Ma'ar Moon, their third studio album, The Selenites Band continue their exploration of ethiojazz, deconstructing and reinventing it to project it towards the stars.Conceived as a journey to an imaginary moon, each track becomes a stage in an interstellar narrative, where myths, ancestral rhythms and Afrofuturism intertwine. Between heritage and experimentation, the group deploys a groove from elsewhere: a…
LP
*100 copies limited edition* This Molar record was created in a few stages. First it was substantial to find creative means which would spark the new material. The Polyend Tracker was perfect for that as it is both simple and surprisingly fresh. Only after that I applied my favourite environment and comfortably sat in my digital domain. The next stage was to find kindred spirits who share the same mental and musical sensibility. Michał Fetler and Jacek Prościński seemed to fit like a custom-made…