Chicago Underground Duo’s new LP Hyperglyph out today; listen to title track

15 August 2025

Photo: Dave Vettraino

After more than a decade of silence, Chicago Underground Duo return in full force today with the release of Hyperglyph. It marks a monumental comeback for the long-running project of composer and multi-instrumentalist Rob Mazurek and composer and percussionist Chad Taylor, a duo whose influence across jazz, electronic, and improvised music has resonated far beyond their Chicago roots since the late 90s.

Building on the ecstatic energy of last month’s lead single ‘Click Song‘, today also brings the album’s title track, a high-voltage transmission of marching rhythms, blown-out trumpet, and cosmic textures. Like much of Hyperglyph, the piece is grounded in rhythmic traditions from across the African continent, but also spirals toward something future-facing and unclassifiable. Take a listen below.

Hyperglyph is out today through International Anthem.

Mulatu Astatke breathes new life into new single ‘Kulun’

14 August 2025

Photo: Karston Tannis

Following the lead single ‘Netsanet’, Mulatu Astatke has shared a new single, ‘Kulun’, ahead of his upcoming album Mulatu Plays Mulatu. A reworking of a traditional Ethiopian wedding song, the track is built around the anchi-hoye scale, central to the country’s musical identity. Recorded between London and Addis Ababa with his long-time UK band, ‘Kulun’ revisits the sounds that helped redefine Ethiopian music in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The ensemble, shaped through years of live performance and sessions at Addis’s Jazz Village, brings fresh energy and depth to the arrangement.

Mulatu Plays Mulatu arrives on September 26 through Strut. Now listen to ‘Kulun’.

The Necks’ 20th album, Disquiet, arrives this October as a triple release

12 August 2025

Photo: Dawid Laskowski

Revered experimental jazz trio The Necks return this October with Disquiet, a sprawling new triple album. Marking their milestone 20th studio release, as well as their 39th year together, the upcoming Disquiet spans more than three hours of vast, absorbing, textural and quietly electrifying sound. According to the press release, the album finds Tony Buck, Chris Abrahams, and Lloyd Swanton “pushing at the outer edges of their collective intuition, building and unraveling hypnotic structures with microscopic focus”. The four extended pieces on Disquiet were “meticulously recorded and sculpted” to explore texture, space, and subtle shifts in mood and rhythm. There’s no set order for listening, just three discs of open and immersive music inviting listeners to experience the music in any order.

We’ll have to wait until October 10th for the album to drop through Northern Spy but we can already hear the transcendent ‘Causeway’, clocking in at 26 minutes. Let it unfold.

Second single released from Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople

07 August 2025

Last month, we shared the exciting announcement of Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople, the first full-length collaboration between poet, musician, and visionary Saul Williams and master percussionist and producer Carlos Niño. Recorded live in December 2024 beneath the black oak and walnut trees of Coldwater Canyon Park in Los Angeles, the album is a powerful gathering of kindred spirits in a setting shaped by ecology, memory, resistance, and release. Alongside Niño’s close collaborators, including Kamasi Washington, Nate Mercereau, Maia, Aaron Shaw, Francesca Heart, Andres Renteria, and a special appearance by aja monet, the album bridges disciplines and generations with spiritual depth and daring imagination.

Following the affective, immersive and meditative lead single, ‘Sound then Words’, they are sharing today the second single from the album, ‘The Water Is Rising / as we surpass the firing squad . . .’, featuring poet aja monet, who delivers a soft yet searing reading of her poem The Water Is Rising, a quiet reckoning with climate, collapse, and care. Williams follows with a hopeful parable about a firing squad, where one member hesitates, caught between duty and belief. It becomes a meditation on the possibility of humanity within the machinery of violence. Haunting, stirring, and laden with quiet urgency, ‘The Water Is Rising / as we surpass the firing squad . . .’ is streaming below.

Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople is out on August 28th through International Anthem

 

Jerk drops first single off upcoming as night falls EP

06 August 2025

Jerk is the project of Brooklyn-based producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Joshua Kinney. Known for blending jazz, funk and electronic music, their work folds tight musicianship into unpredictable forms. They have announced the release of a new EP, as night falls, which is the first in a two-part cycle tracing a single night from start to end. Made with long-time collaborators Martin Wade and Wyatt Rydlewski, the EP moves away from beat-driven roots into live instrumentation, synths, and raw improvisation.

as night fall arrives on November 14th through DeepMatter Records and ahead of it Jerk has unveiled the lead single, ‘dance beneath the dripping moon’. Using a steady loop and a strong groove, the track brings disco and funk to the front. Speaking about it, Jerk comments:

“In our journey through the night, this is the soundtrack of our return to each other—our dance around the fire, our ancient yearning to commune with nature and its spirits.”

Listen to ‘dance beneath the dripping moon’ now.

Gideon Broshy set to release debut album, Nest, in September

30 July 2025

Composer, pianist, and producer Gideon Broshy has announced his debut album Nest, arriving on September 26th through New Amsterdam Records. The record features TIGUE’s Matt Evans (drums), the Silkroad Ensemble’s Mantawoman (dulcimer) and Hub New Music’s Gleb Kanasevich (clarinet),  with production from Grammy-winner William Brittelle. Broshy describes Nest as shaped by an erratic “angularity” in everyday life, and by the tangled social structures that shape how we move through it. “If there is a phenomenological impulse in Nest,” he says, “it’s to trace the immanent shapes and surfaces of the everyday. To sketch or map their routes and connections, their accumulations and multiplicities. A sharp breath, an empty pause, a dragging undertow, a disjuncture in time or pitch or space. To play with shapes, to get at the shape of things.”

Made over the course of three years, Nest brings together harpsichords, dulcimers, celestas, synthesizers, pianos, and software instruments. Broshy built the music by improvising with both acoustic and electronic setups, then breaking the material apart and rebuilding it. “In Nest, oblique musical objects and strands collide, intertwine, and aggregate to form heterogeneous textures and fields, swarms and scenes” he says, adding:

“I treat composition as a form of assembly, here with shards and flecks, in bursts and smears, thrown together into emergent forms.”  It’s feeling out curves and bends and following them into their entanglements and immersions, the indeterminate energetics that compose kaleidoscopic worlds and selves.”

The album moves between sharp, intricate gestures and looser, more atmospheric textures. Broshy describes it as “an ecology of gestures and objects, routes and relations,” adding that “life feels angular, when the flow of experience meets the disorder of the social world.”

Ahead of the album’s release, Broshy has shared the exhilarating and playful lead single, ‘Crumple’. One of five short electronic pieces on the album, ‘Crumple’ moves through fluctuating textures and animated MIDI simulations.