★International Anthem Recording Company
Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes
'Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes' is the debut album from Gregory Uhlmann (SML, Anna Butterss, Duffy x Uhlmann, Perfume Genius), Josh Johnson (SML, Jeff Parker ETA IVtet & New Breed, Meshell Ndegeocello, Anna Butterss, Leon Bridges), and Sam Wilkes (Sam Gendel, Louis Cole, Chaka Khan). The three improviser/arranger/producers’ impressive individual credits encompass such a wide stylistic pendulum swing that a collection of group music from the trio could mine any number of musical territories with masterf…
Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun
Ben LaMar Gay’s de facto debut album, 'Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun', was our attempt to introduce the legendary Chicago composer / improviser / renaissance man to the rest of the world with a compilation of tracks from 7 albums he made over 7 years (though he hadn’t yet made the effort to actually release). The material showcases Gay’s penchant for genre-hopping – from Steve Reich-ian soundscape voyages to Don Cherry-esque polyrhythm treks to Jorge Ben-style vocal-and-string earworm…
In The Moment
Makaya McCraven’s International Anthem debut 'In The Moment' is the album that properly introduced the then-burgeoning drummer/producer to the world. In many ways, it also laid the groundwork for a working method that both McCraven and the label have returned to again and again over the years: nearly 48 hours of live improvised performance recorded by IARC house engineer Dave Vettraino at 1 venue over 12 months and 28 shows - culled, cut, rendered, and remixed into 19 potent pieces of organic be…
Alternate Moon Cycles
Rob Mazurek’s 'Alternate Moon Cycles' was International Anthem's first release. The incredibly spare single-note-centered cornet, bass and organ chant was recorded to tape at pint-sized Chicago bar Curio as part of a performance series that predates any notion of our label’s existence. Documenting this performance – highly unique even within the depths of Mazurek’s vast catalog – stirred those notions, and soon talks began of releasing the recording on a fresh imprint. Performed by Mazurek with …
A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole
Tip! Across A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole, DePlume’s reflections on healing, dignity, and struggle are communicated through a stirring assemblage of disparate musics: ghostly and ancient folk melodies, groove-anchored maelstroms of swirling folk-jazz, elegant string arrangements that strike a midpoint between Ravel and Gainsbourg (courtesy of Macie Stewart), disembodied voices reconfiguring into the shape of a post-modern Greek chorus, noir atmosphere, and allegoric, troubadouric song. Throug…
List of Demands
List of Demands, Damon Locks’s first foray into creating an entire album from spoken and text-based work, finds the Chicago-based musician and educator collecting cultural abstractions and reorganizing them into a firm truth. The album lays out a vision of Black liberation and transmits it outward as a song cycle of bite-sized Nikki Giovanni-meets-MF DOOM-style rhythm experiments. The sample-based constructions are steeped in a lifetime of not only keen cultural observation, but direct communal …
Skylla
Skylla is the debut solo recording of Italian-born and London-based composer, bassist, and vocalist Ruth Goller. This album of otherworldly detuned bass harmonics and dense vocal arrangements was initially released in 2021 by longtime collaborator Bex Burch’s Vula Viel Records, and quickly went out of print. Since then Goller’s notoriety has only grown, and her follow-up record, Skyllumina, was released by International Anthem in early 2024 and met with high praise.
Skylla is the genesis of her …
Looking For My Value: Prologue To A Blade (Signed Copies)
Alabaster DePlume’s debut poetry collection, Looking For My Value: Prologue To A Blade, offers readers a deeper exploration of the themes of dignity, sovereignty, and the work of healing that are present in his music. Arriving as a limited gatefold custom A6 pocket book featuring cover art by British illustrator Ian Wright and design by London-based Jamie Coull, this collection features raw and vulnerable prose that reflects DePlume’s journey toward finding and taking responsibility for his own …
Fly Or Die
In January of 2016, Jaimie Branch launched a monthly free jazz series with a new ensemble at Brooklyn’s now debunked Manhattan Inn. Sharing the first night of her series with a trio on tour from Chicago (Nick Mazzarella, Anton Hatwich and Frank Rosaly), the trumpeter Branch assembled a quartet to match: cellist Tomeka Reid, bassist Jason Ajemian, and drummer Chad Taylor. Between visitors and expats, it was a night of performers exclusively from The Windy City. “I wanted New York to hear what Chi…
The Way Out of Easy
January 2nd, 2023. Aside from being the second of a new year, it was a pretty ordinary night at ETA in Los Angeles, where guitarist Jeff Parker - alongside his ETA IVtet with saxophonist Josh Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Jay Bellerose - had been holding down a regular Monday gig since 2016. At the time, nobody knew it was the first gig of the last year that ETA would be open for business.
Over seven years of holding down that residency, Parker’s ETA ensemble evolved from a band th…
A Willed and Conscious Balance
Tomin’s debut full-length work, A Willed and Conscious Balance, answers a set of questions left unasked in recent years, as a new generation of artists re-energizes the tradition often referred to as “jazz” into its own directions: Where are the composers working with large ensembles? Who are the arrangers creating unexpected charts and dreaming up new orchestral sounds, layered tones and harmonically vibrant colors, the kind that have amended jazz’s “music for soloists” reputation since the swi…
Mighty Vertebrate
After many supporting appearances on IARC across the years (including Makaya McCraven's Universal Beings in 2018, Daniel Villareal's Panamá 77 in 2022 and Lados B in 2023, Bex Burch's There is only love and fear also in 2023, and earlier this Summer as a core member of SML on Small Medium Large) we could not be more ecstatic to announce our first lead artist release with Anna Butterss!!!The Adelaide, Australia-born bassist and composer "has built their career around unshakable rhythm, blinding c…
Live at the Adler Planetarium
Beautiful new live document from interdisciplinary artist, composer and bandleader Rob Mazurek and a nine-piece iteration of his long-running Exploding Star Orchestra (ESO). Live at the Adler Planetarium will be released on LP, CD and DD on September 27th.
Constitution
“Members of the dispossessed, won’t you lend me your ears!”
Small Medium Large
SML is the quintet of bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann. Their debut album 'Small Medium Large' began as a collection of long form improvisations recorded during two separate two-night stands at beloved Highland Park, Los Angeles venue ETA. Unfortunately, this major development site for the burgeoning new West Coast jazz & improvised music sound closed its doors permanently at the end of 2023. T…
Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina
"27-year-old Tomin Perea-Chamblee is a brass- and reed-centered multi-instrumentalist, the composer and arranger of pieces with excellently thorny harmonies, an at-times reluctant musicker and enthusiastic Brooklynite (born and raised, so his admiration primarily concerns the borough’s pre-gentralification qualities), who, by day works as a bioinformatician. If you're in New York, there’s an ok chance that you’ve heard him play before, with young (jazz-adjacent) bands and musicians of some renow…
Placenta
*Limited edition "Placental Purple" color vinyl* Placenta is the fourth collection of broadly imaginative and highly collaborative Carlos Niño & Friends music released on International Anthem in the last four years. It is also the first new music to be released by Carlos Niño & Friends following the November 2023 release of André 3000’s New Blue Sun – an album which Carlos produced alongside André, while co-writing, co-creating/playing, and co-mixing every song. Placenta is announced on April 11…
Rainbow Revisited
** 140g "Pot of Gold vinyl." Edition of 444. With insert. **I travelled to Los Angeles and the USA for the first time in 2019. Although I had not met Carlos Niño in person, we connected via Instagram where he saw a video of me playing a piano motif (titled ‘The One’ in this sequence) that he really liked and expressed a wish to record. This was around 2017. We tried a few times to get me over to Los Angeles, but the timing was always off. Through a performance organised by a creative collective…
Turbulence And Pulse
Black vinyl Cape Town, South Africa-based drummer Asher Gamedze explores relationships of time between music and history on his new album Turbulence and Pulse, out May 5th 2023. Gamedze’s critically-acclaimed debut album Dialectic Soul was released at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in July 2020. Around the release of that record, with friend and writer Teju Adeleye he organized and participated in a joint online discussion “Poesis,” with historian Robin D.G. Kelley and others. One of the no…
Voices of Bishara Live at "Mu"
In January 2023, Tom Skinner and his ensemble performed material from his recently-released album 'Voices of Bishara' (Brownswood, IARC & Nonesuch, 2022) at London club “mu”— a venue founded by the curators at Brilliant Corners and named after the seminal Don Cherry live album. Their performance was augmented by three pieces by Abdul Wadud, whose 1977 self-released solo cello album, By Myself, was a primary inspiration for Voices of Bishara. The woodwinds featured on Skinner's original Voices of…