Shards

If the trio’s first record, Refract, as the title suggests, bent the trio’s sound as a prism does light, Shards is a oneness of performance and transformation, transformation as performance. As Jason Moran and Marcus Gilmore play, BlankFor.ms records micro fragments of time and sends them back to his collaborators sped up, slowed down, reversed, broken into ever tinier grains of data and smeared into a sparkling blur. Moran and Gilmore receive glimpses into their immediate past, or even further back in time, like they’re playing into a broken mirror - not just cracked in its visual plane, but in the sense of its shards shattering time and light, showing them past and future. On this record, we hear that process of hardening, fracturing and rebuilding happening live, up close, with every splinter of time brought to the surface of our ears’ perception. In Shards, these three artists make music of intimate expansiveness out of