Chicago Underground Duo “only gets richer” (The Quietus)

Chicago Underground Duo — the long-running project of composer/trumpeter/synthesist Rob Mazurek (Exploding Star Orchestra, Isotope 217, New Future City Radio with Damon Locks) and composer/percussionist Chad Taylor (jaimie branch’s Fly or Die, Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons, Luke Stewart’s Silt Trio) — release Hyperglyph on LP, CD, and digital download via International Anthem (available on all DSPs September 3). It’s the duo’s first new album in 11 years, and to celebrate, they’ll be performing in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia next month — find tickets and more info below.

Chicago Underground Duo also share today the album’s second streaming single, “Hyperglyph”. The track explodes with marching rhythms and trumpet wails before descending into electronic jazz chanting, until the tune progresses to a fuzzy and triumphant finish.

Mazurek and Taylor have played music together in a multitude of formations over nearly three decades, including their ongoing partnership in Mazurek’s large-format-skyward-expressionism vehicle Exploding Star Orchestra, the expanded Chicago Underground Trio, Quartet and Orchestra (all with guitarist Jeff Parker), and a plethora of other assemblages. The early albums by the Duo have proven to be embryonic blueprints for the avant-jazz / electronic / indie rock hybridizations of the time, making them majorly important moments in the articulation of the “jazz” dimensionality of the then-burgeoning “post rock” sound. That sound, of course, was being transmitted far and wide due to the success of these groups as well as the Mazurek/Parker project Isotope 217, and the Chicago Underground’s frequently-intersecting collaborators in Tortoise.

That said, the sounds being created by this extended family are and were far from static. Just as most of the still-working projects born of that era have evolved, reconfigured, and grown, the Chicago Underground Duo has undergone a number of musical moltings, with the project always in the background of Mazurek and Taylor’s disparate individual investigations. As the project has dropped off and picked back up over the years, their concurrent personal evolutions make the Duo a true reflection of their own lives and friendship.

“Rob is my longest collaborator and also one of my best friends,” says Taylor, who first performed with Mazurek at a club in Chicago in 1988, aged 15.

“When it feels right we do it,” says Mazurek of the gaps in duo activity. “We have worked together and have been friends for a long time. This creates a kind of continuity not only in the music, but in our lives.”

While Mazurek and Taylor’s musical language can be clocked in the slew of projects that they participate in together, the sound of a Chicago Underground Duo album is singular among them. Combine notes of AACM composers like Wadada Leo Smith; albums like Don Cherry & Ed Blackwell’s “Mu” and El Corazon; the classic cut-and-paste jazz production techniques pioneered by Miles Davis and Teo Macero; deep electronic sounds by Bernard Parmegiani, Morton Subotnick, Xenakis, and Éliane Radigue; transformative processing in the realm of Autechre, King Tubby, Mouse On Mars, and Carl Craig… and that gets us close to understanding the alchemic avant-garde sound of the Chicago Underground Duo. Taylor articulates further: “There has always been a lot of African influence in the rhythms we play. With Hyperglyph specifically, we utilize rhythms from Nigeria, Mali, Zimbabwe and Ghana.”

Hyperglyph was mostly recorded in three days at International Anthem Studios, Chicago, in May 2024, where the Duo worked intimately alongside engineer Dave Vettraino. The album’s title is a reference to geometric structures that seem complex at first but, when arrayed particularly in three-dimensional space, enhance perception and lead to new insights. The album’s cover photo was shot by Mikel Patrick Avery in Philadelphia, outside of mainstay creative music venue Solar Myth.

TRACKLIST
Click Song
Hyperglyph
Rhythm Cloth 
Contents of Your Heavenly Body
The Gathering
Plymouth
Hemiunu
Egyptian Suite / Part 1: The Architect
Egyptian Suite / Part 2: Triangulation of Light
Egyptian Suite / Part 3: Architectonics of Time
Succulent Amber

 

LIVE DATES
Friday September 12th – Sound & Gravity Festival – Chicago, IL – tickets
Saturday September 13th – Public Records – Brooklyn, NY – tickets
Sunday September 14th – Solar Myth – Philadelphia, PA – tickets