Album of the Month: Chicago Underground Duo – Hyperglyph
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Twenty-eight years, eight albums, and an 11-year hiatus. When Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor reconvene as Chicago Underground Duo, they're not chasing trends or trying to recapture past glories. They're simply waiting for that feeling. "When it feels right we do it," Mazurek says. This patience, this refusal to force the music, gives Hyperglyph its unhurried confidence. It's the sound of two old friends and musical comrades who have nothing left to prove, making exactly the album they want to make.
A Living Lineage
Chicago Underground Duo emerged from Chicago's experimental jazz scene in 1997, that snowy magical night when Mazurek's cornet and Taylor's drums first locked into something singular. Their early work helped define the jazz-meets-post-rock sound that became synonymous with turn-of-the-millennium Chicago, alongside Tortoise and Mazurek's own Isotope 217. But whilst those groups helped create a moment, Chicago Underground Duo has always operated on a different timeline, appearing and disappearing according to its own rhythms.
Released August 2025 on International Anthem, Hyperglyph is a fitting return. The label has carried the torch for Chicago's avant-garde jazz traditions since 2014, and this album slots perfectly alongside recent releases from Makaya McCraven, Tomeka Reid, and other boundary-pushers. But where some contemporary jazz leans heavily on studio manipulation or compositional density, Chicago Underground Duo strip things back to their essential elements: Mazurek on trumpet, piccolo trumpet, RMI electric piano, modular synths, samplers, voice, flutes, and bells; Taylor on drums, percussion, mbira, and kalimba. Just two musicians, an arsenal of instruments, and three decades of intuitive communication.
The Hyperglyph Concept
The album title itself offers a key to understanding the music. A hyperglyph is a highly complex geometric structure that can seem overwhelming at first but, when thousands are arrayed in three-dimensional space, can significantly enhance perception and lead to new insights. It's an apt metaphor for music that operates on multiple levels simultaneously: rhythmically intricate yet viscerally groovy, structurally complex yet emotionally direct, rooted in jazz tradition whilst embracing electronic experimentation.
From Click to Amber
"Click Song" kicks off with blown-out horn chants doubled by tuned bells, nestled into a muscular stereo-overdubbed polyrhythm that immediately establishes the album's aesthetic. There's a relentless, hypnotic quality to the opening, synthesised bass pulling the ear along cyclically whilst Mazurek and subtle bells elaborate on the melody before departing into improvisation. Taylor's kick drum pattern provides the steady chest-thump that holds it all together. The track lives somewhere between a Tuareg wedding and the most hypnotic moments of Northern African click songs, testament to the duo's deep engagement with African rhythms from Nigeria, Mali, Zimbabwe, and Ghana.
The title track "Hyperglyph" follows with chromatic harmonies played on that RMI electric piano, the same instrument featured on Miles Davis' groundbreaking Filles de Kilimanjaro. But where Davis was pushing outward into electric fusion, Mazurek uses the instrument for unyielding, trancelike repetition. The trumpet introduces time signatures whilst Taylor's chunky rhythm hits hard from the outset. Eventually the piece undergoes a transformation, pitch-shifted trumpet becoming a New Orleans march baritone, Dennis Bovell-style dub sounds revealing themselves, wordless incantations swelling. It sounds as if it's about to tear itself apart, static pulsing merging with recorded percussion to present new rhythms of hissing electronics. It's a spiritual awakening from the bowels of the earth.
After the brief segue "Rhythm Cloth", which touches on UK drum and bass whilst showcasing the duo's technical facility, "Contents of Your Heavenly Body" bursts forth with beat poet intensity. Taylor dances in the electro-cosmic rhythms of Autechre and Amon Tobin whilst Mazurek alternates between horn and spoken word, creating something that feels both ancient and futuristic.
"The Gathering" begins dirge-like and dramatic, in a silent way for a digital age, before abruptly changing course. A childlike melody emerges from the decay, chiming vibes clearing the air for Mazurek's cornet flourishes. It's one of the album's more progressive pieces, showcasing how the duo can shift moods and textures whilst maintaining coherent musical logic.
"Hemiunu", a Chad Taylor composition, centres on a simple waltz-time piano figure, a folk melody that could come from anywhere. Taylor's percussion threads into the sound of a well-worn upright piano whilst the RMI electric piano haunts the high register in wide stereo, alternately dubby and harp-like. Mazurek enters with another folk-like phrase, leaving room for the densely waltzing bouquet to bloom before diving into laser-sharp Lee Morganesque territory. It's a masterclass in tension and release, traditional and experimental in perfect balance.
The Egyptian Summit
The three-part "Egyptian Suite" forms the album's centrepiece and emotional peak. "The Architect" opens with a cyclical pattern from Taylor becoming a bed for Mazurek's repeating, descending, synthetic-Egyptian scaled theme. This call to action dissolves into "Triangulation of Light", where Taylor's bowed cymbals set the stage for exploration of microtonal colour. Mazurek's open and half-muted trumpet stretches frequencies to their limits, joining and un-joining tones like a tornado siren breaking through storm clouds on the horizon.
The final movement, "Architectonics of Time", announces itself with free rolling percussion à la Robert Frank Pozar's mind-bending work on The Bill Dixon Orchestra's classic Intents and Purposes. Here the lineup is limited to two, with no overdubs or post-production. Taylor's singular style and Mazurek's tonal painting coalesce into a maelstrom of intervallic tone and beat before the final repeat of the suite's lead melody. It's pure duo interaction, the symbiosis of 30 years.
The Production Philosophy
Post-production has always been central to Chicago Underground Duo's process. "Sometimes it just flows and we one-take a thing," Mazurek explains. "Other things take time to ferment. We hit those hard in the post production." International Anthem engineer Dave Vettraino was indispensable to the process, recording and mixing the entire album at IARC HQ in Chicago. "We are very open and free in the studio," says Mazurek. "Working with Dave is a joy because he is so intuitive and open with his approach as well. We can try anything with him. In this way it is more like a trio than a duo."
This trio's approach draws on the classic cut-and-recut production techniques of Miles Davis and Teo Macero (Bitches Brew, In A Silent Way, Get Up With It), combined with the duo's longtime interest in deep electronic sounds (Bernard Parmegiani, Morton Subotnick, Xenakis, Eliane Radigue) and transformative processing (Autechre, King Tubby, Mouse on Mars, Carl Craig). The result is music that honours spontaneous improvisation whilst embracing studio manipulation as a compositional tool.
The Comedown
Album closer "Succulent Amber" could fit just as easily on side two of Kraftwerk's Autobahn. After a brief modular synth-induced pan-harmonic melody shift, a steady kalimba is joined by gentle intermittent raindrop melodicism from the RMI electric piano. It's an understated final performance, unadorned by further studio arrangement, yet it manages to point toward incoming mystery with four sudden-yet-patient ascending chords on the low register just before the curtains close. The piano ends on a leading tone, leaving the resolution to the listener. Once we've climbed the mountain, they remind us, we have to deal with what's on the other side.
Why This Matters
Chicago Underground Duo have always existed slightly outside the jazz mainstream, too experimental for purists, too rooted in acoustic tradition for electronic music audiences. But that liminal space is precisely where they thrive. Hyperglyph is a testament to what happens when you refuse easy categorisation, when you trust your instincts over market demands, when you only make music when it feels right.
There are internalised nods here to AACM composers like Wadada Leo Smith, to albums like Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell's Mu and El Corazon, to the entire lineage of Black American improvised music that refuses to stand still. But more than reference points, this is music that lives and breathes in its own space, created by two musicians who have spent nearly three decades developing a shared language that doesn't need translation.
"Rob is my longest collaborator and also one of my best friends," says Taylor, who first performed with Mazurek at a Chicago club in 1988, aged 15. That depth of relationship is audible in every moment of Hyperglyph. This isn't two virtuosos showing off. It's two old friends having a conversation, one that's been ongoing for 28 years, picking up threads from previous exchanges and spinning them in new directions.
The Vinyl Experience
This International Anthem pressing is exemplary. Pressed at Pallas in Germany with lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST, the heavyweight reverse-board jacket with obi strip gives the album the physical presence it deserves. The mastering captures both the rawness of the improvisations and the richness of the studio work, allowing you to hear the room, the breathing, the subtle electronic textures, and the explosive percussive moments with equal clarity.
For anyone who remembers the excitement of Chicago's late-90s experimental jazz and post-rock scenes, Hyperglyph is a welcome return from two of that movement's key architects. For younger listeners discovering this sound for the first time, it's an entry point into a world where jazz tradition meets electronic experimentation, where African rhythms collide with Miles Davis production techniques, where two instruments can create entire universes.
This is boundary-pushing free jazz that never forgets the joy of a good groove. It's cosmic improvisation grounded in 30 years of friendship. It's proof that the act of pushing forward can still harvest rich rewards and audio delight.
