About

Few partnerships in contemporary jazz have proven as quietly radical as that of Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes. First crossing paths at the USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles, the two built a creative rapport that has steadily evolved across a string of collaborative records — from the intimate live document Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar (2018) to the lysergic drift of The Doober (2024) — always resisting easy categorisation, always finding new ways to dissolve the boundary between jazz, ambient music, and electronic production.

Unrelated, their fourth LP together, marks a striking reinvention of the duo's palette. Setting aside the saxophone-and-bass configuration that defined their earlier work, Gendel and Wilkes here reach for guitars, synthesizers, wind synthesizer, and bass guitar, constructing eight compact pieces that hover somewhere between placid groove and outright strangeness. Tracks like Rapworld, Jaguar Paw, and Pi-Pi Malaguii unfold with a dry, unhurried logic — minimal in gesture, maximal in atmosphere — while the album's 27-minute runtime gives it the feeling of a perfectly self-contained world. Composed, recorded, arranged, and mixed entirely by the two Sams, and mastered by Mark Chalecki, Unrelated is as personal and uncompromising a statement as anything in their catalogue.

— Released in edition of 600
— Black vinyl LP

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Label: Not On Label (Self-released)
Format: Vinyl, LP
Released: 2026
Genre: Electronic, Jazz
Style: Abstract

File under: Ambient/Experimental/IDM
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