Shards is an album by pianist Jason Moran, electronic musician and tape-loop artist BlankFor.ms, and drummer Marcus Gilmore. Released on May 1, 2026, via Red Hook Records, the album was recorded on October 19–20, 2024, at The Bridge Studio in Brooklyn, New York, by engineers Amon Drum and Greg Tock.

There is something deeply singular about Shards, in the kind of listening state it creates.

While diving into it, we can get the strange feeling of being entirely focused and only half-present at the same time. The album captures attention, yet it simultaneously seems to displace it somewhere else, as if the music were creating an artificial form of semi-attention: half here, half wandering through fragments of memories, sensations, or unfinished thoughts.

This is puzzling music, music made of shards indeed: incomplete recollections, emotional residues, ideas that seem to return altered each time they appear again. And perhaps this is where the album becomes fascinating. Jason Moran, BlankFor.ms, and Marcus Gilmore somehow recreate the experience of fragmented consciousness itself. Sounds emerge like thoughts crossing the mind, disappearing before fully forming, while rhythms and textures overlap like competing layers of attention.

There is also a form of nostalgia here: nostalgia for the impossible idea of a pure present untouched by memory. Every sound arrives already contaminated by traces of what came before it. Thoughts replay themselves differently each time. The past leaks continuously into the present.

What makes the album so compelling is that this emotional fragmentation feels profoundly human. In an age of interrupted attention, overlapping realities, and permanently divided focus, Shards may ultimately sound — thanks to the musicians’ ability to transform fragmentation itself into an artistic language — like an unusually honest portrait of contemporary consciousness.

Discover next: Juli Deák – Brisk (Thanatosis)

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Shards

Trackliting:
1. Shard I (8:01); 2. Tape Loop A Echo (5:43); 3. Shard II (4:30); 4. Shard III (6:42); 5. Barbershop (5:52); 6. And The Pieces Are Falling (2:48); 7. Shard IV (6:06); 8. Shard V (4:52)

Jason Moran: piano; BlankFor.ms: electronics; Marcus Gilmore: drums

Shards was released on May 1, 2026 // Red Hook Records RH1009 — label launched in 2021 by former ECM producer Sun Chun