OPENING PROJECT FILE
2025
Avant-Garde Jazz
Cursed Month
Guitar, piano, drums and live-electronics.
ALBUM_FILE / 2025 / CHAOSPACE RECORDS
Cursed Month (败月)
Cursed Month (败月) is the vibrant debut album from guitarist and composer Lingyuan Yang. It acts as an emphatic statement of intent, diving deep into microtonality, complexity, and electroacoustic, dropping several facets of Yang's varied artistic practice into a bold, energetic whole.
Spanning seven pieces composed between 2021 and 2024, Cursed Month (败月) draws inspiration from Chinese astrology, where each of the twelve animal signs is said to have a corresponding inauspicious month—a time considered unlucky to be born. It serves as both a conceptual and structural anchor for the material on this record. This suite builds a world that's unsettling and inscrutable, yet teems with violent youthful fervour.
released August 15, 2025
Released on Chaospace Records
LISTEN / STREAM
WATCH / LIVE DOCUMENTATION
CREDITS
Lingyuan Yang — guitar and electronics
Shinya Lin — piano
Asher Herzog — drums
All compositions by Lingyuan Yang
Produced and edited by Lingyuan Yang
Mixed and mastered by Zijie Li
Art and design by Lingyuan Yang and Yiduo Liu
Selected Press
2025 / PRESS LOG01The 20 Best Jazz Albums of 2025PopMatters↗02The Best Jazz on Bandcamp, August 2025Bandcamp Daily / Dave Sumner↗03Classifiche Dell’Anno Domini 2025Livore↗04Avant Music News Best of 2025Avant Music News↗05Monica Mazzoli Awards 2025Kalporz / Monica Mazzoli↗065 álbumes de 2025 (honorable mention)El Intruso / Sergio Piccirilli↗07Free Jazz Collective’s Top Albums of 2025Free Jazz Blog / Nick Ostrum↗08Encuesta 2025 – Periodistas InternacionalesEl Intruso↗09Editor Jeff Maisey’s Top 50 Albums of 2025Veer Magazine↗10Best Music of 2025Notes on the Program / Jeff↗
“Lingyuan Yang has crafted a brooding, often tumultuous beast that takes the best aspects of freeform jazz and turns it into something unique and beautiful.”
— Chris Ingalls, PopMatters ↗
“His quarter-tone guitar creates an unsettling heaviness through the friction between microtonal intervals and conventional piano tuning.”
— Lawrence Peryer, The Tonearm ↗
“An album saturated with thick floods of notes that fill the brain to capacity.”
— Mike Borella, Avant Music News ↗
“A powerful statement from a young composer with a distinct musical voice.”
— Glenn Astarita, All About Jazz ↗
“Cursed Month has clarity despite the bucket of techniques and styles it flings at the listener.”
— Nick Ostrum, Free Jazz Blog ↗
“A whirlwind of intricacy and precision… built on microtonality and an electroacoustic bedrock.”
— Joseph Neff, The Vinyl District ↗
