In 2025, Roger 23 makes his return to Night Defined Recordings. Following his 2022 album “Bounds of a Moral Principle and Established Standard Behavior”, the unmistakable Saarländer revisits his teenage memories of the Saarbrücken-Leicester connection through a collaboration with his UK kindred spirit, Tom Dicicco. In just two months, the duo has created a collection of ten tracks rich in sonic depth, embodying their dedication to and belief in the power of exploration.

In a world where it’s easy to point fingers or resist change, Tom Dicicco and Roger 23 choose a different path. They see creativity not just as self-expression but as a way to inspire future generations. Their mission is to challenge norms, trust the process, and create with purpose.

This album is more than just a musical project — it’s a statement that true innovation arises from freedom and risk-taking. The journey has taught them more than music production — it has reinforced the importance of conviction and trusting their vision. Their work serves as a reminder that leadership is about breaking new ground and inspiring others to do the same.
WE CANNOT COMPLAIN, IF WE DON'T DO IT BETTER

Mastering and cut by Loop-O
Cover Design by Studio Fjeld
Cover Photo by Vincent Forstenlechner
Pressed by Austrovinyl

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Third edition of NDR’s limited 12’’ various artist releases on the occasion of the label’s 2025 Japan tour. In addition to NDR owner and regular Juergen Vonbank, the record brings new faces to the label in the form of the Luxembourg duo Nothing in Common, Salzburg’s markmechanik and Berlin’s Tresor resident LNS.

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The Blue Soul is Juergen Vonbank's second solo album after "Trial & Eros" from 2018. It deals with the relationship to the color blue, the conventional and individual-personal associations with it, as well as the diffuse feeling that this color is able to convey. Digital and analog experiments in electronics, club music and dream pop.

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Night Defined Recordings is proud to welcome Roger 23 for his first solo album in seven years since the widely acclaimed „Thao-N-Y“ on Mensch in 2015. The enigmatic producer, DJ and record digger has released his music via renowned quality labels such as Playhouse, Bio Rhythm, Meakusma and Ilian Tape among others. After appearing on our rapidly sold out first NDVAX compilation, he’s now back at NDR with an album, which showcases the versatile musical interest of the cheerful Saarländer. Self-imposed highest demands on sound quality, complete openness to give place to various musical influences and the experience of many years of a music inhaling individual make ‚Bounds Of A Moral Principle And Established Standard Behavior‘ an album complete in itself.

Tracklist:

A1 - J.C.'s State Fair
A2 - A Finite Sequence Of Defined Computer Implementable Instructions
A3 - Particular Conditions That Someone Is In A Specific Time In Use To Indicate A Position On A Diagram
A4 - An Informal Contraction Of A Material Universe
B1 - Field I: (infringe or go beyond the bounds of a moral principle or other established standard of behavior)
B2 - To The Same Extent I Execute
B3 - Field II: (infringe or go beyond the bounds of a moral principle or other established standard of behavior)
B4 - Afta Mi Till Dem Di Soil
B5 - Field III: (infringe or go beyond the bounds of a moral principle or other established standard of behavior)

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Second edition of Night Defined Recordings’ new compilation series launched
last year. NDVAX02 gathers tunes of longstanding old hands alongside rising
talents. Four songs that find their common ground in a strongly pronounced
emotional and melodic level.

Mastering and cut by Loop-O
Sleeves printed and embossed by letterpress Manufaktur Salzburg

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Night Defined Recordings is glad to present its first full-length album so far: ?erb's „A12 Proceedings“. A record made in sparse moments while living between the crooked walls of an old apartment building in Bucharest. Hand-stamped 180g edition with riso print inlay + download code.

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In 2015 we stumbled across an EP by a low-profile Romanian producer, which retrospectively was a pivotal event for the development of the label. This record was Serb's 'Transient Recs 1', released via Listen2me from Bucharest. We were deeply touched by the harsh and progressive sound of the tunes, which at the same time were so musical.
After a remix for Fehlzuendung and his LP 'A12 Proceedings' in 2018, things are coming full circle in 2021 as ?erb returns to NDR with 'Transient Recs 2', a collection of tracks produced between 2015 and 2018.

Mastering and cut by Loop-o
Artwork by Anna Florea
Riso printed cover artwork by booksforfriends Bucharest

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The third long player on Night Defined Recordings sees SUED affiliate SW. presenting his new mini LP ‘Night’ and walking a tightrope between jazz and club music. The tracks manifest and dematerialize themselves almost in a non-tangible and floating way, which can be seen as more than just a musical approach but rather shows the artist referring to issues of volatility and evanescence. While listening, some may find themselves in the dark and dusty atmosphere of a jazz club, where the band in the corner at the other end of the room is playing their instruments just when the beat kicks in and puts you right into the club atmosphere.

Written & produced by SW. at SUEDstudio Mastering by Mattias Fridell

Artwork by Studio Belser

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Happy Today is the third album from guitarist/bandleader’s Jeff Parker’s long-running ETA IVtet, recorded live at Lodge Room in Los Angeles on August 20, 2025. This fresh entry into the IVtet’s catalog captures the instantly recognizable group sound of Parker and the band—including drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson—on record outside of the now-shuttered Highland Park micro-club ETA for the first time ever.

Tracklist:
A: Like Swimwear
B: Happy Today

https://listen.k7.com/b3b26dc1-7f37-4bbf-9b1d-9a067e6677bd

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Released in 1979, Tete Mbambisa's Did You Tell Your Mother delivers the ultimate blend of African groove with American modal grace, making it one of the all-time classic albums of South African jazz. With Mbambisa presenting original compositions at the piano alongside Basil "Mannenberg" Coetzee on tenor sax and flute, the acoustic quartet featured here is rounded out by Zulu Bidi from the band Batsumi on bass locking in with Dollar Brand drummer Monty Weber. This 2026 reissue presents a flat transfer of the master tapes with album artwork restored using illustrator Hargreaves Ntukwana's original ink drawing.

A self-taught musician, it was as leader of the vocal group The Four Yanks in the early 1960s that Tete Mbambisa’s music career took off. With encouragement from Abdullah Ibrahim, he dedicated himself to the piano and went on to record with The Soul Jazzmen in 1969. Mbambisa's solo recordings from the 1970s, produced by Rashid Vally for the independent As-Shams/The Sun record label, document his creative peak as a recording artist and have contributed to earning him an honorary doctorate and a place among the figureheads of South African jazz history.

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CD!

Sometimes the title of an album tells you everything you need to know. Laurence Pike’s Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet is like that: The music within represents a search for freedom, potentiality—liberatory strategies that transcend the ego and the solitary, atomized figure.

But in this case, the album title is also a red herring, because there is no jazz quintet here—just Pike, his drums, and his machines, not so much an ersatz ensemble as a purely notional one, a thought experiment equipped with drumsticks, circuitry, and the desire to go beyond hardwired limits.

And the results, strictly speaking, aren’t really jazz, though they incorporate the vocabulary of jazz, along with that of ambient, electronica, and post-rock. They are some other thing, cognizant of genre but never beholden to it. Again, we’re talking about a search for freedom here.

The Sydney-based musician has a long history of coloring outside the lines, not just in his solo recordings—including four albums for the Leaf label between 2018 and 2024—but also in the trio Pivot (later PVT); Szun Waves (alongside saxophonist Jack Wyllie and Border Community’s Luke Abbott); Triosk, which recorded an album with Jan Jelinek in 2003; and even post-punk titans Liars, whom he joined in late 2018.

Of his first album for Balmat, Pike says, “My loose concept was: What does music sound like when the expectations of late capitalism are removed from it? How might a jazz musician from an idealised culture of the future, or even another world, utilise musical language when the conventions of style and marketing are no longer a factor in music making?”

That inquiry, he says, connects to his “guiding principle: that the purpose of music is to access something bigger than the individual, and reveal a sense of possibility and freedom in the world to the listener. To create an understanding that the future can be something other than what we imagined or expect, even unconsciously.”

Heady ideas, but plug into his stream-of-metaconsciousness flow and you may start to intuit what motivates him. There is a deeply lyrical expression in these pieces—in the ruminative piano of opener “Guardians of Memory,” for example—but also a sense of exploded perspective, of ideas approached from more angles than any one mind could dream up. Of a collectivized consciousness, of mycelial networks branching across tone and rhythm and timbre, of ideas articulated in distributed fashion, nodal points dancing across drum heads.

Pike’s imaginary quintet is hardly without precedent; it’s a continuation of concepts floated across Jan Jelinek’s Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, Burnt Friedman’s many guises, and much of the recombinant improv of the International Anthem roster, not to mention the far corners of ECM’s catalog in the late 1970s and 1980s, which Pike says have been integral to his development since he was a teenager. Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet is a point in a continuum, a voice in a conversation, a question with no obvious answer: How can the search for otherness in music manifest something true about ourselves?

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Happy Today is the third album from guitarist/bandleader’s Jeff Parker’s long-running ETA IVtet, recorded live at Lodge Room in Los Angeles on August 20, 2025. This fresh entry into the IVtet’s catalog captures the instantly recognizable group sound of Parker and the band—including drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson—on record outside of the now-shuttered Highland Park micro-club ETA for the first time ever.

Tracklist:
A: Like Swimwear
B: Happy Today

https://listen.k7.com/b3b26dc1-7f37-4bbf-9b1d-9a067e6677bd

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Contact: [email protected]More