Shards is the second album by the trio of jazz pianist Jason Moran, electronic musician BlankFor.ms (Tyler Gilmore), and drummer Marcus Gilmore, released on May 1, 2026 via Red Hook Records in digital, CD digipack, and limited-edition 180g translucent vinyl formats. The album follows their 2023 debut collaboration Refract, which the New York Times praised for working "across medium and style, with composed elements and prepared loops" — and Shards deepens the trio's shared language considerably, pushing further into what the group describes as the real-time design and construction of musical events. Recorded over two days in October 2024 at The Bridge Studio in Brooklyn, engineered by Amon Drum and Greg Tock, mixed by Rick Kwan, mastered by Taylor Deupree, and produced by Sun Chung, the eight-track, 44-minute album unfolds as a largely spontaneous improvisational work in which acoustic performance and electronics are treated as a single continuous material.The trio's methodology is distinctive and immersive: as Moran and Marcus Gilmore play, BlankFor.ms records micro-fragments of sound in real time and feeds them back — sped up, slowed down, reversed, granulated into grains of data, smeared into layered blurs — so that the processed returns feel less like overdubs than a living third voice within the performance. BlankFor.ms, known for working with degraded tapes and analogue synths in a post-J Dilla tradition, brings a textural sensibility that UKVibe describes as making processed sound feel "like glimpses through a cracked mirror." The core of the album is a five-part "Shard" suite that ranges from swinging electrofunk on "Shard I" to sensual atmospherics on "Shard II" to neo-classical haze on "Shard III", with the closing "Shard V" resolving into a stately solo piano elegy. Alongside the suite, "Barbershop" works an angular groove that continuously dissolves and reforms, "Tape Loop A Echo" transforms glitchy electronica into skittering post-bop, and the extended "And the Pieces Are Falling" is described by UKVibe as "lush, patient, mournful, with BlankFor.ms pulling lace out of noise."
