Red Hook Records

Jason Moran/BlankFor.ms/Marcus Gilmore: Shards

| Tyran Grillo

Shards continues the sonic excavation the trio of Jason Moran, BlankFor.ms, and Marcus Gilmore began with Refract, though excavation may be too archaeological a word for music so hip to its own aliveness. Everything arrives mid-combustion, pieces of a shattered mirror refusing ordinary alignment. These performances fold time against its own grain until memory and anticipation become indistinguishable textures rubbing against the skin of the present. The band approaches improvisation as the construction of an unstable infrastructure erected from interference. One senses throughout the record an in-the-moment commitment to permeability, every sound allowing another to pass through it without surrendering its own integrity.

“Shard I” emerges from a piano that appears electronically bruised, its fractured utterances surrounded by Gilmore’s rolling cymbals and drums, which seem to illuminate the negative space around it. Moran approaches the keyboard with extraordinary restraint, to the point where resolution becomes irrelevant. The music adopts a state of ongoing arrival, inhaling its own vapor. When a trip-hop undercurrent finally surfaces, it does so with the uncanny sensation of stumbling upon a geographic anomaly. As BlankFor.ms exposes hidden nerves beneath the music’s flesh, echoes gather around Moran’s lyrical improvisations with a cinematic charge, though never one interested in spectacle. Their beauty self-governs cautiously, carrying tenderness through hostile terrain without ever announcing vulnerability outright.

“Tape Loop A Echo” feels generated from the molecular aftermath of this slow-motion explosion. Tiny droplets gather patiently before expanding into something oceanic. Texture becomes the governing principle here, as rhythms thicken into edible densities and harmonies dissolve against synthetic residue. Gilmore’s drumming possesses astonishing elasticity, simultaneously grounding and destabilizing the ensemble, granting Moran enough gravitational footing to plunge deeper into abstraction without succumbing to it entirely.

The emotional center of the album resides within “Shard II,” where malleted percussion and drifting cymbals create the sensation of standing at the threshold of some unnamed psychic aperture. Moran’s piano circles with mournful patience, peering beyond ordinary cognition toward regions where identity loses its edges. The piece carries genuine existential terror, purified into surrender. Its descent recalls the metaphysical fatalism at the heart of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, particularly Jen Yu’s impossible leap into emptiness, transformed into an act of lucid acceptance. The mood reaches a strange reconciliation with annihilation, not dramatizing death but absorbing it into the bloodstream of the composition itself.

“Shard III” follows with devastating gentility. Moran’s pianism here feels almost aqueous, every phrase dissolving as it forms, yet never losing emotional precision. The piece carries the intimacy of private mourning transformed into communal ritual, offering solace without sentimentality. “Barbershop” abruptly ruptures this meditative atmosphere, diving headlong into groove-driven delirium. Dissonant harmonies collide against frenetic percussion and electronic manipulation in an ode to overstimulation. Its true brilliance lies in the way it converts velocity into psychological compression. One feels hunted by the unbearable acceleration of perception in an age where every signal arrives multiply split.

“And The Pieces Are Falling” moves through ambient terrain haunted by synthetic fauna and distant tonal apparitions, creating the impression of wandering through a digital ecosystem abandoned by its creators yet still self-sustaining. Then comes “Shard IV,” whose luminosity mutates into something volcanic. “Shard V” closes the cycle with blues inflections. Moran allows slight asymmetries to remain exposed on the surface of things, through which human fragility breathes.

The watchword for Shards is tactility. This album does not simply present sound as touchable. It treats touch as a philosophical condition, every vibration carrying evidence of contact between bodies, machines, histories, and griefs. Moran, BlankFor.ms, and Gilmore present this evidence in a language capable of articulating what ordinary coherence cannot contain.

PJEV/Kit Downes/Hayden Chisholm: Medna Roso

| Tyran Grillo

When using the word “inspire” today, we tend to think of it from an emotional perspective. If you look it up in a dictionary, however, you will find that it also means to inhale (think of it as a combination of “in” and “respire”). In that sense, the music documented on Medna Roso, the third and latest release on producer Sun Chung’s Red Hook Records, is inspired in the most physical way one could imagine. Recorded live at Cologne’s Agneskirche in the summer of 2021, and meshing the voices of Kit Downes (organ), Hayden Chisholm (alto saxophone, shruti box, analogue synthesizer, and throat singing), and Zagreb-based female vocal quintet PJEV, the program resituates songs from the Balkans, cultivating endangered traditions in the foreground of our attention in search of new growth.

Downes’s organ is firmament in which the album’s breaths flow from the pursed lips of invisible ancestors. The pipes, resonant and harmonic by virtue of their location, feel omnipresent—never close enough to touch yet never far enough to deny. What begins as a statement of heavenly creation reveals an earthly heart as PJEV churns the soil of “Listaj goro ne žali be’ara” (Bloom you mountain, don’t regret the blooming flowers). In combination with the subsequent “Ova brda i puste doline” (These hills and desolate valleys), it captures the carelessness of youth and the darker realities of adulthood. The titular landscapes and their features are the measures of a contemplation that pales in scope, always struggling to evoke the majesty of a universe so vast that, ultimately, death is required to comprehend it.

The ensuing journey takes us two steps inward for each outward. Through the solo strains of “Što si setna, nevesela” (Why are you sad and cheerless?) floating over a gong-like substrate, the haunting call and response of “Odkad seke nismo zapjevale” (Since when sisters, we haven’t sung), and the a capella “Službu služi viden dobar junak” (Been in service, a good hero), in which the singers hinge themselves in a massive temporal pivot, we can feel the immensity of things.

Connecting these songs are six instrumental interludes where the divisions of reed, metal, and breath melt in the crucible of singularity. The resulting alloy looks like silver, tastes like copper, sounds like gold. As with the throat singing that sometimes escapes Chisholm’s lips, it trembles in the presence of something formless. Settling beneath the weight of our transgressions, it takes shape in the listening while the terror and fury of nature, but also its quiet invitation, attune us for the time being—because time is only being.

Qasim Naqvi/Wadada Leo Smith/Andrew Cyrille: Two Centuries

| Tyran Grillo

Two Centuries is the second album from former ECM producer Sun Chung’s Red Hook label and may one day be regarded as its most defining release. As electronic musician Qasim Naqvi, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and drummer Andrew Cyrille put 11 of Naqvi’s tunes under their triangular microscope, the cells of our listening are magnified.

“For D.F.” opens with a political charge. Written for Darnella Frazier, who captured George Floyd’s murder, it uses distortions to evoke the white noise of our collective trauma. As subtle as this music is, with its near-comforting swells and honest lyricism, it offers not a moment of reflection but the reflection of a moment, a vivid gaze at a life lost on the brink of a society in turmoil. This is, perhaps, the deepest nuance of the titular centuries, the dividing line of which is drawn not numerically but on the shifting sands of justice.

What follows is a veritable tilling of melodies made possible as much through listening as playing. The foundation is often forged between Cyrille’s tools and Naqvi’s febrile choices of color. In fortifying each for harvest, they dip into disparate references. Hear, for example, the influence of Bryn Jones in “Sadden Upbeat,” while “Tympanic” recalls Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 4.

Contrasts in mood abound, ranging from sunlit (“Palaver”) to brooding (“Wraith”). “Bypass Decay” is of special note, chugging like a train against (and ultimately losing to) an encroaching night. Throughout, Smith speaks (e.g., “Spiritual is 150”) and sings (e.g., “Organum”) in equal measure, but always with a message to convey in the role of griot, reminding us of something spiritual, though severed from any particular tradition. As is evident in “Orion Ave,” where the free-floating hymn reigns supreme, faith walks these empty streets alone, trailing its shadow like a burden of care.