Chicago Underground Duo – Hyperglyph

"Hyperglyph" is 2025, the first new album in 11 years from the longtime Chicago Underground duo project of composer/trumpeter/synthesist Rob Mazurek and composer/percussionist Chad Taylor.

Mazurek and Taylor have made music together in a variety of formations over nearly three decades, including their ongoing partnership in Mazurek's large-scale skyward expressionist vehicle Exploding Star Orchestra, the expanded Chicago Underground Trio, Quartet and Orchestra (all with guitarist Jeff Parker), and a plethora of other assemblages.

The duo's early albums proved to be embryonic blueprints for the hybridization of avant-jazz, electronics and indie rock of the time, and were important moments in articulating the jazz dimension of the then-burgeoning post-rock sound. This sound was, of course, widely popularized by the success of these groups as well as the Mazurek/Parker project Isotope 217 and the often overlapping Chicago Underground collaborators in Tortoise.

Just as most still-active projects of this era have evolved, reshaped and expanded, the Chicago Underground duo has undergone a series of musical transformations, with the project always in the background of disparate individual sonic explorations. The simultaneous personal evolution of Mazurek and Taylor as the duo project stops and starts again makes it a true reflection of their own lives and friendship.