*Yowsers* A New Album by Ben LaMar Gay!
*announcing*
IARC0097
Ben LaMar Gay
Yowzers
LP, CD, DD out June 6th, 2025
BLG is back! Yowzers – a new album by the Chicago-born composer, improviser, instrumentalist and musical folklorist – is out June 6th, 2025. The album’s opener / title track “yowzers” is out on all digital music platforms today.
(( photo by Joe Jones ))
In the growing tradition of Gay’s recorded output – including his 2018 greatest-hits-meets-debut album Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun and 2021’s critically-acclaimed Open Arms to Open Us, which have both become legendary for enveloping myriad sounds, stories, and dimensions of music into potent bodies of work – Yowzers is an utterly unique, joyfully irreverent psychedelic fantasia of folklore, free jazz, and avant-garde Blues.
At the heart of the album is Gay’s working quartet with Tommaso Moretti (drums, percussion, voice), Matthew Davis (tuba, piano, bells, voice), and Will Faber (guitar, ngoni, bells, voice). The group’s chemistry is palpable, cultivated over years of touring and performing together.
“A big part of the language this quartet has developed is spatial,” says Gay. “It’s seeing and hearing it live. You’re dealing with a thing that is older than the industry that sells it, and if you’ve never experienced those bodies in the room, there can be a disconnect.”
Striving to capture that raw, unfiltered energy on Yowzers, Gay tracked his quartet live at Palisade Studios in Chicago, with all four musicians sitting in a small circle, channeling and documenting their collective vibrations in real-time.
To expand the sonic spectrum of the album, Gay also composed and recorded a series of pieces in-studio at International Anthem HQ in Chicago. Working alongside engineer Dave Vettraino, Gay augmented his studio constructions with contributions from his bandmates, woodwind player Rob Frye, and a mini-choir comprising vocalists Ayanna Woods, Tramaine Parker, and Ugochi Nwaogwugwu.
One of the highlights from this batch is the album’s titular opener “yowzers." It’s a simple, soulful, three-chord piano and vocal repetition nestled in the hypnotic, swelling effect of the Woods/Parker/Nwaogwugwu choir. The song’s undecorated lyrics cut deep, echoing the climate of our times with a universal Blues we can all feel in our bones:
Ain’t gon snow no more x4
Rain gon pour and pour x4
Fire don’t stop no more x4
As a whole, Yowzers recalls the high-minded freedom of Liberation Music Orchestra, the abstract boom-bap balladry of Georgia Anne Muldrow, the unbridled rhythms and sandpaper bellows of Bukka White, the harmolodic cartoon glory of Arthur Blythe’s Illusions, or the oft-copped but rarely distilled patterns of Naná Vasconcelos. It’s a fresh thought made up of old ideas, filtered through an improvisational approach and a lifetime of stories and secrets embodied.
Yowzers Brooklyn Listening Event
We're working with friends at Pique-nique NYC to host an exclusive advance listen of Yowzers in Brooklyn, with Ben LaMar Gay joining in conversation. DJs Loum and Proudfoot will also provide sounds for the evening. Free with RSVP.
Monday, May 5th, 2025
7-10PM
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
(( photo by Alejandro Ayala ))
...about Ben LaMar Gay…
Ben LaMar Gay is a genuine original. An imbued composer, conjurer, and channeler of cosmopolitan Blues, a patently eclectic artist who Jeff Parker calls "hands down, one of my favorite musicians on the planet today," Gay is a Southside Chicago native who was raised in the tutelage of the legendary AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians).
With his first instrument, the cornet, and an intuitive sense of self-production, in youth he traversed the diversity of the city's music scenes (jazz, hip hop, house, electronic, rock, avant garde, salsa, latin jazz, et al) before embarking on a several-year residential relocation to Brazil. Beloved by listeners and collaborators alike for his ability to absorb and poetically refract the sound of any context he's immersed in, Gay's return home to Chicago in the early 2010s marked the beginning of a compositional output that has since been referred to by WIRE Magazine as "Pan-Americana."
As elusive as he is prolific, across seven under-the-radar years of work Gay diligently composed, produced and recorded seven collections of original music before compiling and issuing his unreleased 'greatest hits' as a debut album – Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun – for International Anthem in 2018. Also in 2018 Gay composed an original score for the Tribeca award-winning short doc The Good Fight. In 2019, he composed an original score for the Brazilian underground carnival profile This Is Bate Bola, and debuted new music commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Also in 2019, he composed and performed a duet with the DuSable Bridge while it was raised over the Chicago River.
For Time:Spans Festival 2021, at DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City, Gay debuted a new composition – "Known Better. Still Lit" – that was commissioned and performed by Wet Ink Ensemble. Later in 2021, Gay released the critically-acclaimed album Open Arms to Open Us via International Anthem & Nonesuch Records. In 2022 he released Certain Reveries, an album of duo compositions on International Anthem, and an accompanying film – “Balogun,” in tribute to the late Eddie Harris - which he staged, directed, filmed, and scored entirely himself.
In 2023, Gay was a Mellon Foundation Archives Innovation Fellow with Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation in Chicago. As composer in residence with The National Theater of France in 2024, Gay wrote original music for Dorothee Muyaneza’s “Inconditionelles.”
In June 2025, Gay releases Yowzers via International Anthem.
Deluxe Vinyl Package
Yowzers comes on a 140g color LP in heavyweight reverse-board jacket, with insert sheet, IARC 2025 obi strip & poly-lined inner sleeve. Pressed at Pallas in Germany, with lacquers cut by Daniel K @ SST.
Available on Limited Edition *Ipomoea Jalapa* color vinyl for $29 USD.
Also available on Classic Black vinyl for $24 USD.
The SPRING ‘𝟮𝟱 𝗕𝗨𝗡𝗗𝗟𝗘 is now available !!
We’re deep in the showers / flowers biz, which means it’s time once more for a fresh season of new IARC releases. The Spring '25 Bundle collects all 3 of this season's yet-to-be-announced new LPs, (including Resavoir & Matt Gold's Horizon) and ships them as a single parcel.
Purchase gets you a bundle-exclusive discount of 10% off the LP prices as well as a discounted shipping cost.
The bundle will ship from our warehouses in the US, EU, and UK, but don’t snooze, the quantity available in each warehouse is limited! Early purchase is recommended to ensure the lowest possible shipping, tax, and VAT costs.
All items will ship together in one package around June 13th. Bandcamp downloads will be sent via email for all the releases by, or before, the ship date.
Order the bundle on Limited Edition Color Vinyl
Order the bundle on Classic Black Vinyl
