RZR | RZRecords - An Extremely Independent Music Collective

~ 20 Years of RZRecords, a Retrospective Revisiting Haggari Nakashe & gaop's Pictures of Gold and Terror (2006) 45 tracks of noise rock, grindcore, free jazz, and Japanoise (inspired) madness, and what twenty years did (and didn’t) change In the mid-2000s, the underground DIY scene was a wild west of file-sharing and CD-R trades. Blogs were the gatekeepers, forums were the community, and “going viral” meant someone posted your album on a Blogspot page that got 400 hits or mentioned you on Myspace. In the middle of this productive chaos, an unlikely partnership formed between  Haggari Nakashe , a Canadian-Japanese artist who at the time had been quietly terrorizing local noise shows in Montreal and Osaka simultaneously, and  gaop , a Eurasian multi-instrumental experimentalist. Their 2006 collaborative effort, Pictures of Gold and Terror , remains one of the most polarizing and fascinating relics of that era’s extreme mu...

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 ...

   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 pe...