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Where Does Jazz End and Noise Begin? A Guide to the Avant-Jazz Spectrum

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By the RZRecords crew Let us embark, dear readers, on a journey so fraught with peril that it makes deciding whether to put (soy) milk or cereal in the bowl first seem like a simple binary choice. We are here to answer a question that has plagued philosophers, musicians, and unfortunate neighbors since someone first blew a raspberry into a saxophone: Where, exactly, does Jazz end, and Noise begin? It is the sonic equivalent of an optical illusion. Stare too hard looking for the melody, and you will miss the texture. Lean in too close to the rhythm, and the atonality will bite your nose off. We are traversing the Avant-Jazz Spectrum, a vast, chaotic, and often unapologetically loud landscape where the ghosts of old standards collide with the feedback loops of a broken amplifier. A landscape that has, over the decades, produced distinct and fiercely contested sub-territories: noise jazz , which is jazz that has let noise move in and redecorate; jazz noise , which is noise that...
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Haggari Nakashe presents "Texture Hunt" [new release]

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   RZRecords cat:  RZR2026HN01  · UPC:  5063958149059  ·  New Release · Digital & Streaming Haggari Nakashe - Texture Hunt Texture Hunt  is exactly what the name promises. And I'm still in it. Winter in Ontario doesn't let go easily. It doesn't ease or soften, it just sits, grey and immovable, pressing down on your chest like a hand. The days are short and the nights are long and somewhere in between them the hours lose their shape entirely. The cold gets into rooms and stays. I stopped counting the days. I stopped a lot of things. When everything else went quiet in the way that frightens you, I turned to synth and samples the way a drowning person reaches for anything solid. Not out of inspiration, and not out of craft. Out of something closer to desperation, a need to keep my hands moving, to keep some part of me anchored to the physical world while the rest of me drifted somewhere I couldn't always find my way back from. That period wa...
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Physical vs. Digital: Should Experimental Artists Still Press CDs in 2026?

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  By: The Guys Who Run RZRecords (yes, we're still here) So, you’ve spent the last six months hunched over a modular synth, a four-track, and a broken MP3 player sending signals through some pedals. You’ve captured the sound of a dying fluorescent light bulb, layered it with a field recording of a construction site, and set it to a rhythm only you and maybe your cat can understand. Congratulations. You’ve made exclusive art. Now comes the existential question that keeps us up at night here at RZRecords headquarters (which for some of us is a spare room with a lot of boxes, and for others a laptop):  What format do you release it on? It’s 2026. We have streaming. Everyone's streaming away. We have high-resolution hid-def downloads. We have the infinite, intangible cloud. And yet, we’re here, seriously debating the merits of the Compact Disc. That shiny, 80s-era frisbee that everyone loves to mock. As a label that’s been “ruining the world of noise and jazz since the early 00s,...
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UIUIUI, Haggari Nakashe & gaop Drop a Chaotic 12-Track Split on RZRecords

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RZRecords cat: RZR2025SUHg · UPC: 5063863770034  ·  New Release · Digital + Vinyl (CD coming soon) We don't do things quietly around here. You know that. But every once in a while, a release lands that even we weren't fully prepared for, something so unhinged in the best possible way that it makes you want to flip your desk and start moshing in the ruins. The super WOOPER split is exactly that release. Fifteen minutes and twenty seconds. That's all it takes. Fifteen minutes and twenty seconds of raw, beautiful, organized chaos, twelve tracks of free jazz, experimental noise, punk fury, and psych weirdness. All killer, zero filler. super WOOPER split by UIUIUI and Haggari Nakashe & gaop 🖤 Buy the Vinyl on ElasticStage 🖤 Who Are These People and Why Are They Like This UIUIUI is an experimental duo consisting of Ori Zornitzer (Plopsk6x) and Itay Raiten (Koala), officially headquartered in the legendary and entirely rea...
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Harsh Noise Wall 101: A Guide for the Curious but Confused

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So you clicked on something called "Harsh Noise Wall" and now you're here, either because you're genuinely curious, someone dared you, or you've already heard it and need someone to explain why you can't stop listening to an unbroken wall of static for forty-five minutes. Welcome. You're in the right place. This is not going to be a short article, and that is entirely appropriate, because Harsh Noise Wall, HNW, to those of us who use the abbreviation unironically, is a genre that rewards patience, obsession, and a willingness to sit inside a sound that most people would describe as "is that a broken appliance?" It is not a broken appliance. It is art. Probably. What Is Harsh Noise Wall? Let's start at the beginning, which in HNW terms means starting with a wall. Literally. Harsh Noise Wall is a subgenre of noise music characterized by a sustained, largely unchanging mass of sound, feedback, distortion, static, white noise, blown-out electroni...
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