Photo: Mikel Patrick Avery

Chicago Underground Duo, the long-standing project of composer and multi-instrumentalist Rob Mazurek and composer and percussionist Chad Taylor, have announced their return with a new album. Titled Hyperglyph, the record lands on August 15th through International Anthem and marks their first release in over a decade. Active in various formations since the late 1990s, Chicago Underground Duo emerged out of a fertile Chicago scene, and have been instrumental carving paths into the intersections of jazz, electronics, post-rock and improvised music. Across various configurations — duo, trio, quartet, orchestra — and a wide web of collaborations, Mazurek and Taylor have continued to return to this project as a site of focused, often elemental exploration. “Rob is my longest collaborator and also one of my best friends,” says Taylor, referring to their first performance together at a club in Chicago in 1988, when he was 15. “We have worked together and have been friends for a long time”, Mazurek adds. “This creates a kind of continuity not only in the music, but in our lives.”

Recorded over three days at International Anthem Studios in May 2024, the album distills decades of shared language into something intricate yet immediate. The pair’s music has long drawn on a broad and deep array of influences and on the upcoming Hyperglyph they cite rhythmic traditions from Nigeria, Mali, Zimbabwe and Ghana, alongside a lineage of sound that reaches from Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell’s Mu, to Miles Davis and Teo Macero’s studio work, and into the textural worlds of Xenakis, Éliane Radigue, King Tubby, Mouse on Mars, and Autechre, amongst others. As Taylor puts it, “There has always been a lot of African influence in the rhythms we play,” and in this setting, they serve as a through-line across shifting terrain.

Alongside the announcement comes the lead track ‘Click Song’, an ecstatic and buoyant track offering a first glimpse into the world of Hyperglyph. Take a listen now.