BlankFor.ms / Jason Moran / Marcus Gilmore

Shards
Release date: May 1, 2026
Label: Red Hook Records

Performance and transformation merge as one on Shards - the eagerly anticipated second album from pianist Jason Moran, electronic musician BlankFor.ms, and drummer Marcus Gilmore. Shards continues the sonic exploration the trio initiated on 2023's Refract, digging deeper into the possibilities of design and construction of musical events in real time.

Where Refract explored the intersection of analog and digital worlds, Shards finds the group comfortably settled into their sound and taking their time, unfolding events over lengthier pieces. As Moran and Gilmore play, BlankFor.ms captures microfragments of sound—sped up, slowed down, reversed, granulated—and sends them back to his collaborators like glimpses into a broken mirror. The trio receives echoes of their immediate past, or even further back in time, and gathers these temporal shards into improvisations that possess the organic unity of paintings while functioning as sonic collages.

The interaction between the acoustic instruments and electronics yields fascinating sonic ambiguities. BlankFor.ms navigates between extremes, at times generating harsh, complex noise textures and at others crafting lush, beautiful soundscapes. Moran moves from delicate, rhapsodic passages to rougher, more angular terrain, while Gilmore drives infectious grooves alongside moments of pure abstraction and space. The blend of timbres often obscures their sources, creating an immersive audio landscape where piano, drums, and processed sound interweave into a single, multidimensional whole.

The album's conceptual framework centers on fragmentation and reconstruction. As the liner notes observe, "the piano and drums fold into each other and themselves, looping back and forth between sound, data, past, future—information moving at the lightning speed of musicians' minds." Each musical gesture by these musicians leaves a mark in three virtual dimensions, shaping an infinite number of images as the record plays.

Following the critical reception of Refract, which The New York Times praised for its work "across medium and style, with composed elements and prepared loops," Shards represents a maturation of the group's collaborative language. The spectrum of ideas is broad. Meditative passages give way to exploratory abstraction, and angular rhythms coexist with lyrical melody.

Throughout, the production quality maintains Red Hook Records' signature meticulous attention to sonic detail, presenting the trio's intricate interplay with remarkable clarity and presence.

Shards makes music of intimate expansiveness from embodied histories, time, and technology, a record where the process of hardening, fracturing, and rebuilding happens live, with every splinter of time brought to the surface of perception.

Refract
Release date: September 1, 2023
Label: Red Hook Records

Digital meets analog on Refract - the remarkable new trio album by electronic musician and tape loop specialist BlankFor.ms, MacArthur fellow pianist Jason Moran and innovative drummer Marcus Gilmore. Refract is an uninhibited sonic marvel that combines electronics, piano, and drums in real time. By spontaneously recording loops grabbed on the fly and re-infusing the sonic planes with various effects, the results borne on Refract are sounds and energies rarely heard before.

Tyler Gilmore, aka BlankFor.ms, is a highly respected and unique artist known for richly textured, emotive music created from his rare collection of degraded tapes, analog synthesizers and an old spinet piano. In a way, his whole artistic life - thus far - has led up to this moment. “I’ve lived a few musical lives at this point,” reflects Tyler. He began his career as a large ensemble jazz composer, attending New England Conservatory and studying with Moran, while concurrently fostering an interest in electronic music. “I had always loved electronic music and found myself trying to mimic electric textures in orchestrations. Eventually I decided to simply go to the source and work with electronic tools, first improvising with people using DAW-based delays, harmonizers, reverbs, and feedback. But it was really the discovery of cassette tape as a creative medium that spurred my electronic creations into something more.” This analog electric aesthetic captivated the interest of producer Sun Chung, who upon hearing Tyler’s work, proposed the idea of an album pairing him with improvisers - an idea Tyler called both “thrilling” and “terrifying”.

From the onset, Jason Moran seemed to be the most natural fit. “In the time I’ve spent with Jason, first as a student and then arranging and orchestrating for a few of his projects, I was always in awe of his receptiveness to the present moment… he has an almost aggressive ability to listen and take everything in, and a faith that were was more to find if he were to listen even further,” says Tyler. “The idea of combining my electronic vocabulary with [Jason’s] playing was terribly inspiring. I had no idea, literally no idea, how he would play when confronted with tape loops, or feedback resonances, or harmonized and twisted loops of what he’s just played.” With Marcus Gilmore, it was even more mysterious. Tyler and Sun agreed that a percussive presence was necessary for the album to work and again, Marcus was the ideal candidate.

Sun and Tyler went through a significant pre-production period before recording. Tyler prepped a few different pathways for the trio and tried to remain unattached to whichever branch might bear the most fruit. He prepared composed pieces (with melodies and chords), musical sketches with lots of runway, and various tape loops that could serve as a jumpoff point for improvisation. “Each composition served as a starting point,” Jason Moran reflects. “Tyler’s ability to mine the song as it was being made created another dimension. It felt more like part of our music reality was being refracted back to us. In that way, intentionality was especially important, because any moment could come flooding back exponentially bigger.” Refract marks the first time Jason has ever worked with an electronic musician and fulfills a long-held desire for the Grammy nominated artist. “I have always longed for an outside force to manipulate my piano song and drag the sound into a cistern filled with soft clay.”

Album highlights “Affectionate, Painful” and “Inward, Curve” came from more composed ideas, while the album opener “Onset I”, “Onset II” and “Stir” were the result of an open-ended framework. On the various tape loop improvisations, the trio really takes flight. Tyler left all of his prepared tape loops unlabeled so that they wouldn’t know which was which when they began. “The improvisations resulting from this process were some of the best moments of the session,” says Tyler. “Jason and Marcus were sublime in their ability to instantly compose in, out, and around the loops. I was improvising using effects pedals, modular devices, and tape machines, and I had a feed of the piano and drums flowing into my effects. I was creating textures, gestures, motifs out of what they played. I often found myself trying to grab the interesting moments and silently hold them (bent, reversed, granulated, delayed) waiting and listening for a natural pivot moment to reintroduce them.”

Spontaneity was a major tenant of the session and instilled in every take. In fact, the mystery of “what would come out” was the driving creative force behind the entire project. “One of the aspects I love about this album is how interactive all the sonic elements are,” Sun Chung says. “A lot of it was recorded in real time, so there is a real sense of immediacy in the music’s energy that one can sense while listening.” Paired with some more of the through composed tracks, this 16-track program is an incredibly balanced and dynamic work.

“When Tyler was a student of mine at New England Conservatory, we would listen to a lot of electronic music and I recall asking how he would transpose these ideas to analog instruments,” Jason reflects. “In this way, this is his answer.”

Refract is the latest release from the adventurous Red Hook Records, which was founded in 2020 by Sun Chung after a decade-long tenure at ECM. “I love combining sonic worlds and genres - especially mixing electronics and acoustic.” Refract follows in the footsteps of Two Centuries, a daring collaboration between Wadada Leo Smith, Qasim Naqvi and Andrew Cyrille, released last year, which also combined electronic and acoustic instruments in a similarly magnificent way.