Jazz
LEITER · 16 October 2026
“PRISM BREAK” is the only track on ECLIPSE with a drummer on it, and it’s also the only one Darius Blair and Niko Huber didn’t write by themselves: Noah Fürbringer, the drummer in the Moses Yoofee Trio, takes a co-writing credit and plays it. Everything else here rests on two instruments, saxophone and guitar, with no bass anywhere, and with Khadim Seck’s percussion turning up on “TITAN” and nowhere else. That’s how the Frankfurt duo arrive at a first full-length, after the March 2026 EP IN A NEW ORDER and after starting to play as a pair at the beginning of the pandemic, more than a decade into their friendship.
The label is LEITER, the house Nils Frahm and his manager Felix Grimm set up to gather their work under one roof, and which keeps a studio of its own at Funkhaus Berlin. Part of the record was cut there, in Saal 3, with Antonio Pulli; the rest at Soultize Studio in Offenbach with Nicolas Butka, who also co-produces. Felix Burtscher recorded the drums, Zino Mikorey did the master and Andreas Kauffelt cut the vinyl. No keyboard and no synthesiser appears anywhere on the credit sheet, and Huber (the son of a guitar builder, who started on drums at three) says flatly that he isn’t much of a fan of effects pedals.
Blair has spelled out what they’re after: “a common language between hip hop and jazz, something modern and cutting edge that also hits the same spiritual space as the cats in the 60s”. The reference points are current ones, Immanuel Wilkins, Julian Lage and Venna, and the titles are all set in capitals like a twelve-inch sleeve. “CHASING DOWN LESSING STREET”, which sits second, came out of a car crash Blair was caught in after leaving the studio, as Neil Duggan reports in All About Jazz; “GAMBLIN’” pulls hardest towards fusion, and “INTERLUDE”, dropped into the middle of the sequence, works as a hinge between the album’s two halves. And Blair puts the measure of the ambition himself: “When you create that special atmosphere, when you can hear a pin drop, that’s as rewarding as it gets.”
“01/01/25” closes the album with vocal interventions that add nothing, and the credits don’t list a singer at all. That same credit sheet accounts for everything which isn’t saxophone or guitar with notarial precision: who plays drums and on which track, who adds percussion, who recorded what and in which room, who cut the lacquer. The one moment where the duo stops working alone is the one that goes unnamed, and on a record sold and sustained on the austerity of its setup that isn’t a small-print matter. The sheet lists no keyboard, no synthesiser and no bass: nine pieces held up by one saxophone and one guitar, and nothing else.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents