ECM-CORE WATCH (2025)
Lifted, Tile, Nuke Watch, Andre 3000, Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, A Single Ocean, Unchained, Emanative, Phi-Psonics, Peace Flag Ensemble
Ok there’s not really a new genre called ECM-core, and please don’t use this term in public settings, but hey, we all love the ECM label, right? It might’ve all started for you like it did for me, with a dollar-bin copy or two of the ubiquitous Köln Concert double LP, and then a few of the true ECM gems on top of that, Nice Guys, Jewel in the Lotus, Love, Love and the like, but by now it’s become clear that the entire label is in fact completely massive, and we’ve dug down past the Garbarek/Rypdal bedrock to records like Three Day Moon, The Colours of Chloe, The Paul Bley Quartet, Bells For the South Side, and Kjølvatn. And nowadays it does seem like there’s a bunch of current/extant bands (collectives) (projects) that are jamming in an ECM-influenced way, not necessarily trained/seasoned jazz musicians either, more of a post-punk milieu. Call it “psycho ECM” or “mutant ECM” if you will (I sure just did), but “ECM-core” will do for polite (and, to reiterate, private) conversation. So what bands (collectives) (projects) am I actually talking about? Well…
LIFTED Trellis (PEAK OIL) is the record that set it off, actually. It was released less than a year ago in November 2024, already reviewed here on the BlastiStack back in February 2025, and still sounding great. My impression as I keep listening while eyeing the track-by-track credits is that one Matt Papich is the musical leader of this band, credited with the most instruments (“synths, guitar, bass, percussion, fx, field recordings,” for example, on just one of the tracks), to which Max D (aka Future Times recording artist Maxmillion Dunbar) lends some pretty sick free-jazz trap-set drumming. Papich is on every track, and Max D is on all but one, and to that core duo other musicians (Dustin Wong, Tim Kinsella, Jacob Long of Black Eyes/Mi Ami/Earthen Sea, more) layer contributions in a steady-flowing future-jam atmosphere.
TILE Warmfth (MEDIUM SOUND) And this one came in hot just a week or two after I heard Lifted, recommended by Jeff Conklin’s Ambient Audiophile newsletter, so I knew something was up. Tile are from Indianapolis and play in a mode I have dared to call “full on Weather Channel.” Before hearing Tile, I often meant this descriptor as a bit of a dis, but ears have come around here in the 21st Century, and it’s not what you do with the sound/setting itself, it’s what you do in the space it creates. Perhaps the correct subsubgenre is not “ECM-core” but in fact “mutant Weather Channel”? Warmfth is from May of 2024, looks to be Tile’s debut and only record as of this writing, and is honestly a jaw-dropper.
NUKE WATCH “Wait For It” (IMPATIENCE) And the jaw drops just a little further with this one, another reco from Ambient Audiophile. Not sure it 100% goes here, to be honest — ECM is a more radical label than you might think, but “Wait For It” is even more radical than that. Side A is 22 minutes of constantly shifting duo percussion madness, what the one-sheet calls “a battery of electronic and sampled drums,” and Side B is 21 minutes of, well, I agree with Conklin when he says “honestly, I don’t fucking know.” Such heady music also gets me thinking that when I’m making these provisional ECM-core assessments, I have to watch for what I’m calling “the noise threshold.” That is, trying to answer the questions: at what point does radical experimentation push out of its jazz/folk/rock/etc base and become what is better described as straight-up noise? At what point has “experimental jazz” morphed completely and become simply “experimental music”? Nuke Watch is a dweller on those particular thresholds; if you dig deeper into their Beat Detectives collective/label/Bandcamp presence, you’ll find an Eddie Harris Tribute Album, so I do think they come from a (however trained or untrained) jazz mindset and therefore qualify as ECM-core.
ANDRE 3000 New Blue Sun (EPIC) And to go ahead and acknowledge an elephant in the room, I mean of course New Blue Sun is ECM-core Ground Zero (released November 2023), whether you like or not. Untrained post-punk (in this case rap music) artist playing in a post-jazz post-ECM style? Yes, all of that. And I, for one, like it quite a bit. Untrained doesn’t mean you can’t make music at all, it just means the music you’re making is untrained. Self-taught, and hopefully in a good way. Furthermore, it’s not Andre that makes the album with his perfectly basic melodic electric flute playing, it’s the overall composition, arrangement, and musical direction, which I would credit not to Andre, but to International Anthem label mainstay Carlos Niño. International Anthem is basically the original ECM-core, the Oppenheimer Project for the ECM-core nuclear reaction that was New Blue Sun.
JEFF PARKER ETA IVTET Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy (EREMITE) It’s good that the International Anthem label has finally come up, because they are like an American ECM of today, something they’ve been building up to for a full decade now. There are probably a good 40 records on International Anthem that could go on an “ECM-core Watch (2025)” list immediately, so I’m basically excluding that label from this article, or else I’ll never finish it. Which is why I didn’t pick any of Jeff Parker’s many excellent albums on the label, but this stone cold durational jazz classic double LP that was released by Eremite, the Jeff Parker ETA IVtet taking an approach comparable to those more free-form/modal/extended Keith Jarrett Trio records with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette that were on ECM, most specifically the 1984 LP Changes and massive 1989 sequel-of-sorts Changeless.
A SINGLE OCEAN s/t LP (SHMEE) I’m going to drop this one in here because it’s from right here and right now in my own Chicago backyard and I was just at the record release party. Although it is a very electronic album, and one thing about ECM is that their records always have at least some acoustic instrumentation somewhere (reeds, piano, acoustic string instruments, acoustic drums). I’m not sure all the albums on this list do; Nuke Watch certainly don’t (unless you count sampled acoustic drums, and maybe you should), and A Single Ocean barely do at all. However, there is fretless bass soloing on the album’s final track “Second Wind,” and not only might fretless bass alone give any new 2025 record instant ECM-core status, the tonalities of the album throughout, however electronic, are ones I would associate with the ECM label.
UNCHAINED Gabbeh (A COLOURFUL STORM) I also don’t know what genre to put this record by former (?) noise (?) merchant (?) Nate Davis in, but believe it or not, it also has fretless bass on it, so into the ECM-core pile it goes with its solo-recorded jazzy chord sequence ostinato-vamps over creative drum machine patterns that are overdubbed with guitar melodies and solos. Getting a Felt/Maurice Deebank/“Evergreen Dazed” vibe, but with more of a jazz language being used. Has a pretty loose first-take improvisational approach that actually might do the material less favors than a tighter and cleaner production job would have. Someone hook Unchained up with Marcus Miller, stat!
EMANATIVE Abstract Intuition (HOME PLANET) This one popped through at the last minute via Doug “Heathen Disco” Mosurock via Otis “Dusted” Hart, Emanative being a group from the UK that on this album has thee Peter “Zummo with an X” Zummo themself sitting in on trombone, and hell yeah it’s ECM-core. Closes with an 18-minute epic called “Pathways to Presence,” but my favorite track is the trombone/electronics throwdown “Messimalism (Above Thought).”
OK, I could keep going but Substack is telling me this “post is too long for email” which makes me feel long-winded, and I should stop anyway before this just becomes a list of any contemporary jazz or jazz-adjacent project I bump into (if it hasn’t already). That said, I do want to give Phi-Psonics from Los Angeles and Peace Flag Ensemble from Regina a mention as they both represent ECM’s more acoustic, pleasant, and, yes, trained approach (even if they’re not exactly bathed in ECM’s trademark reverb). Phi-Psonics play a very nice blend of bite-size spiritual jazz and bite-size noir jazz (all but three of the fourteen tracks are under six minutes, and seven of them are under four minutes), a very L.A. combination. On their May 2025 double LP release Expanding to One, Jay Bellerose from the aIVmentioned Jeff Parker ETA IVtet plays drums on two tracks, including one of the best and the longest, side three opener “Discovery.” Peace Flag Ensemble are a little more bucolic and folky, as might befit being from Regina and not Los Angeles. Check out their February 2025 release Everything is Possible, and thank you for humoring my “ECM-core Watch (2025).”