Complex, physical, uncompromising: The Reza Askari Roar Quintet blends avant-garde jazz with the raw power of punk and metal. You don’t have to understand the code “xAYb v8v dYAx”—you have to experience it.

Anyone who wants to understand jazz regularly reaches their limits. The same is true of the new album by the Reza Askari Roar Quintet, which bears the cryptic title “xAYb v8v dYAx.” The crux of the matter is this: at first, you can’t understand a thing here. But perhaps—and this is the good news—you don’t have to. 

For Askaris’s music is not a puzzle that can be cracked with the right code. Instead, it follows its own logic: it condenses, breaks apart, repeats itself obsessively, and finds surprising paths out of the supposed chaos, only to return to exactly that same place shortly thereafter. Rooted in avant-garde jazz, the quintet’s sound draws simultaneously on the energy of metal and punk and bands like Meshuggah or The Dillinger Escape Plan—not as a stylistic reference, but as an attitude: complex, consistent, and radically physical at every moment.

The fact that this power is generated entirely through acoustic means is what gives the ensemble its special appeal. No wall of amplifiers, no electronic distortion effects that would offer a safe hiding place. Instead, a group that collectively negotiates every movement, every note, and every moment of tension in the immediacy of the live performance. 

Askari himself speaks of “communicative strangeness” in reference to his music. Perhaps this attitude can also be explained by a very personal influence: his two-year-old daughter. For, as the double bassist goes on to say, she shows him what it means to be a punk—instinctive, free, and at times headstrong.