Czech musicians Floex & Jan Šikl present Directors, a collaborative album exploring neoclassical composition, electronic experimentation and chamber ensemble performance. Across four movements, Directors reveals a musical language where classical formality and electronic spontaneity exist as equal voices.

The dream of melding classical music with contemporary music, electronic in particular has been a cherished if not always successful one – it is as if the protocols of classical music, its formality, its strict adherence to composition, conduction make it difficult to meld with the more spontaneous messthetics and “inauthenticity” of sound manipulation of current approaches. Labels such as Nonclassical have made great efforts to breach these insuperable barriers but the wonderful Directors, by Floex and Jan Šikl is among the most successful meldings to date. Here, wishful dreams become an organic reality, as a chamber ensemble, featuring violins, viola, violoncello, clarinets and vibraphone are subject to interventions redolent of clubland, which they take on board without missing a beat.

Jan Šikl is the conductor here, co-responsible for these compositions with the Czech composer Tomáš Dvořák, who provides clarinet and electronics. Underpinning these recordings was a sense that we live in an increasingly partisan, divided world in which it has become less possible to understand alternative perspectives. Directors acts as a paradigm, an example set in music of how apparently antithetical voices might rise in unity.

Italian saxophone, cornettophone, and bansuri flute player Gianni Gebbia makes his debut on Minority Records with Sleep, released on LP and Bandcamp on May 1, 2026, the same day that marks the artist's 65th birthday.

Sleep can be considered an introspective and ambient meditative work, whose structure does not correspond to traditional jazz compositions, but rather consists of extensive improvised hypnotic soundscapes without precise boundaries, using soprano saxophone and cornettophone with electronic textures. Just as the Renaissance cornetto was an instrument full of symbolism, representing life, death, and eternity, where the eight carved edges of the instrument represent the unbroken line of eternity and infinity, a similar prism can be used to view the free structure of the work without a clear ending. Sleep is therefore more of an auditory meditation exploring the space of sound, the gradual evolution of motifs, and the atmosphere of dreaming through Gebbia's improvisational playing.

Gianni Gebbia, born in Palermo, Sicily, and a graduate of the University of Palermo's Faculty of Philosophy, is an internationally renowned Italian saxophonist, flutist, and composer, known for his experimental and avant-garde jazz style. Gebbia is considered one of the world's leading specialists in circular breathing technique, which allows him to create continuous, long tones, often leading to polyphonic illusions. In 1990, he participated as a soloist in the Total Music Meeting in Berlin organized by FMP alongside musicians such as Steve Lacy and Lindsay Cooper. A year later, he initiated a collaboration with German percussionist Gunther Sommer and double bassist Peter Kowald, reviving one of the historic duos of European free jazz. In 2000, The Wire magazine ranked him among the leading solo saxophone players.

Taupe’s latest album release, waxing | waning delivers jazz experimentalism, ‘skronk’, avant-rock, and electronics, by the Glasgow-based trio, due out now on Minority Records. Across its seven tracks, waxing | waning captures Taupe’s approach – bold and boundarypushing – shaped by a fresh shift in the band’s dynamic and compositional approach.

Taupe’s waxing | waning, co-composed and realised by its players in a studio that was once an undertaker’s premises in Glasgow, is an absolutely affirmative album, an act of cultural defiance in desperate times.

Comprising Mike Parr-Burman (guitar, bass guitar, electronics), Jamie Stockbridge (alto and baritone saxophones) and Alex Palmer (drum kit, percussion), Taupe work up a storm of skronk, free jazz and harmolodic frenzy whose closest relations include Zu, Melt Banana and John Zorn. However, waxing | waning is from its opening, stuttering blasts, an exercise in seeking out and claiming new territory, finding unique and novel permutations in which jazz, rock, electronics interbreed at breakneck pace. Here is a group determined to say and do things they don’t get to say and do elsewhere in their musical lives.

Taupe are a Glasgow-based trio whose free(math)avant(skronk) concoctions fuse sour sonics, effervescent improvisation and sludgy, doom-laden riffage into a sound both unruly and sharply honed. Often seeming to operate by a kind of spooky telekinesis, they pivot from turbulent, unwieldy chaos into taut, metronomic precision, cultivating an approach that feels both volatile and vividly alive. Steeped in a DIY ethos, Taupe balance wonky charm with exacting focus, bridging the no-wave disorder of DNA or James Chance with the squeaky-clean intricacy of groups like goat (jp) and Horse Lords, all while maintaining an anarchic spirit that takes any pretensions out to the woodshed.

Experimental trio Taupe erupt onto the sonic landscape with their new single “Lemonade Tycoon”, out 13 November 2025. The single offers a tantalizing glimpse of Taupe’s third album, waxing | waning, set for release on 6 March 2026 via Czech label Minority Records.

Lemonade Tycoon nods playfully to the classic business simulation game of the same name while forging a sound wholly its own. Its final sequence, a live drum improvisation captured via a saxophone clip-on mic and routed through saxophonist Jamie Stockbridge’s intricate effects pedal chain, creates a spectral echo, sparkling and chaotic like shaken lemonade, simultaneously precise and unruly.

Taupe’s concoction of free(math)avant(skronk) moves fluidly between sour sonics, effervescent improvisations, and sludgy, doom-laden riffs. The trio wields an almost spooky telekinesis, pivoting from taut, metronomic precision to turbulent chaos with effortless grace. Ever-informed by a DIY ethos, their music carries a wonky charm, bridging the nostalgic disorder of no-wave icons like DNA and James Chance with the squeaky-clean precision of contemporary experimentalists such as Goat (JP) and Horse Lords (USA). Live, their performances rumble with a fun, anarchic spirit, discarding pretension and self-seriousness in favor of kinetic, immersive sound.

Minority Records is releasing a unique boxset Politique du silence with three early albums from Sylvain Chauveau, French composer of minimalist neoclassical music.

“When I made my first albums as a composer, I was obsessed with minimalism, and this quote from the film director Robert Bresson summed up my state of mind. I set myself three principles: 1) Use silence as a starting point, 2) Only add sound when it's absolutely essential, 3) Don't imitate the Anglo-Saxon musicians I admired, but draw on the musical culture of my country, France which lead me to listen intensively to Satie, Debussy and Ravel.” Chauveau explains the background to his work.

The collection Politique du silence contains the recordings of Des plumes dans la tête (2004), Un autre Décembre (2003) and Nocturne impalpable (2001) on coloured 180 gram vinyls. The cover features artwork by French photographer Valéry Lorenzo.

“When I discovered the simple and powerful black and white pictures by Valéry Lorenzo, in the 90s, I immediately fell in love with them. We became good friends and since then I ask him to let me use one of his photos for most of my album covers, or to make my portrait for press shots. It has become a real collaboration, music and images, for more than 25 years. It was then logical to ask him again for the cover of this boxset, like a gentle reflection on my piano and strings era.It's a true honor for me to see my early music recollected, repackaged, remastered after all this time. Which gives me hope that this music, in which I've put all my soul and heart during the years 2001 to 2003, is maybe not forgotten yet.” Chauveau himself adds of his collaboration with Valéry Lorenzo.

The boxset Politique du silence is being released in two editions: a standard version and a limited version of 50 accompanied by a numbered and signed large-format photograph by Valéry Lorenzo. The limited edition will be available only through the Minority Records e-shop.