Collection: The Circling Sun

The Circling Sun formed in New Zealand in the mid-2000s from a community of record collectors, DJs and music producers who shared an obsession with the spiritual and modal jazz of the 1960s and 1970s. The debut "Spirits" (Soundway, 2023), built around the playing of drummer and primary songwriter Julien Dyne alongside keyboardists Guy Harrison and Cory Champion of Clear Path Ensemble, a saxophone section, harp, and a choir of mostly Pacific Island and Māori singers, drew directly from Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane while integrating Latin rhythms and the choral vocabulary of the Pacific into the same ensemble. The choir is not decorative: it carries cultural weight specific to Aotearoa, acknowledging the country's own musical traditions alongside the American jazz lineage the band absorbs. "Orbits" (Soundway, 2025), their second album, shifts the reference points to the mid-1970s and pushes further into electronics, layering arpeggiating Prophet synthesisers and modular electronics alongside saxophone, upright piano and vintage drums. The new references are Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Yusef Lateef's Atlantic era, and the Brazilian jazz of Azymuth and Airto Moreira: a slightly harder, more groove-oriented approach that moves between Afro-Cuban rhythms and expansive ambient jazz meditations within the same record. Soundway Records, the London label behind both releases, documents global jazz with an editorial seriousness that the Circling Sun's catalogue fully justifies.