Infinity
With Infinity II, saxophonist and composer Jeremy Rose reunites with pianist Novak Manojlovic, drummer Tully Ryan and modular synth artist Ben Carey for an immersive meditation on time, motion and memory. The record is less a collection of tracks than a single unfolding gesture: patterns repeated, reshaped, and remembered, evoking the rituals of recall and transformation itself.
This is their second album, following on from the critically acclaimed Project Infinity: Live at Phoenix Central Park, and Rose’s 26th release. Beautifully recorded live at Lazybones Lounge in Marrickville, Sydney, Infinity II is a hypnotic exploration into the outer edges of jazz, ambient and electronic music.
With modular textures weaving through swirling improvisations and lyrical saxophone lines awash in reverb and delay, Rose and his collaborators craft immersive soundscapes that feel both timeless and urgently present.
“This group comprises some artists that I particularly resonate with. Everything feels completely natural when we play,” Rose explains. “It’s surprising listening back to it—it’s as if we are improvising composed pieces. The group manages to improvise form so well that it sounds composed. I guess that’s the beauty of it. Novak and Tully had just returned from touring together in Hekka, and they sounded particularly connected. But between the four of us, we managed to bring out something that night—everything came together.”
Mia Taninaka’s artwork extends the album into a visual realm. Her dreamlike imagery, where mythical figures, natural forms and celestial motifs intertwine, mirrors the music’s balance of fragility and power. Her painting invites the viewer into a world where organic and surreal patterns repeat and dissolve in continuous transformation. The vibrant palettes echo the music’s layered improvisations, suggesting motion, and timeless presence.
Jeremy Rose is an ARIA Award winning Sydney-based saxophonist, composer, band leader and label director, recognised as one of Australia's most dynamic and forward-thinking creative forces.. Known for his wide breadth of work, gift for vibrant melody, and musical curiosity, his career spans over 25 unique original recordings as a leader and more than 150 published works. His current ensembles include The Earshift Orchestra, The Vampires, Vazesh, Visions of Nar, Project Infinity, and the Jeremy Rose Quartet.
Rose has collaborated internationally with artists including Lionel Loueke and Kurt Rosenwinkel, and within Australia with members of The Necks—notably pianist Chris Abrahams and bassist Lloyd Swanton. He has performed and toured extensively in Australia, Europe and the UK.
In recent years, Rose has been interested in the philosophy and processes of minimalism, particularly through his academic investigations into memory, ritual and mindfulness in the music of The Necks. This research - encompassing extensive interviews and publications - is reflected in his music with informed reflection on ideas of time, repetition, and improvised minimalist processes. In 2024, this culminated in a performance of Julius Eastman’s seminal 1974 work Femenine at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney).
He has received numerous accolades, including an ARIA Award for Best Jazz Album, the APRA AMCOS Art Music Award for Jazz Performance of the Year, two Bell Awards, and a shortlisting for the Australian Music Prize. Rose was recently featured in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Spectrum, which heralded him as “transforming the Australian contemporary jazz scene.”
As the founder and director of Earshift Music, Rose has fostered a creative community described by NYC Jazz Record as “hell bent on pushing the very definition of jazz,” and by the Sydney Morning Herald as “Australia’s most significant outlet for jazz-related music.” Since its inception, the label has released more than 100 albums, celebrating its 15th anniversary in 2024 with a landmark program of concerts and recordings.
Jeremy Rose | tenor and soprano saxophone, bass clarinet
Novak Manojlovic | keyboard and synthesizers
Ben Carey | modular synthesizer
Tully Ryan | drums
About the Band
Novak Manojlovic is a pianist, composer and improviser based in Sydney, and the current Artistic Director of SIMA (Sydney Improvised Music Association). His work explores contrasts—acoustic and electronic, diatonic and atonal—shaping a distinctive voice that pushes traditional composition and performance practice into contemporary contexts. He has released music under his own name (Places, People, ABC Music) as well as with projects like Grown Ocean, HEKKA, NoMansLand, and Colourfields, and has collaborated with artists including NGAIIRE, Sampa the Great, and Godtet.
Ben Carey is an internationally acclaimed modular synth composer, improviser, and researcher whose recent releases include Metastability (2023), created on the rare 1975 La Trobe Serge “Paperface” system, and the duo album Vaporous Matter (2025) with Joshua Hyde
Joshua Hyde & Ben Carey. His work navigates real-time human–machine interaction, improvisation, and spatial experience.
Tully Ryan is a dynamic and versatile drummer best known for his adventurous work with the genre-defying ensemble Godtet. His rhythmic depth and fluidity anchor and propel improvisational frameworks with both precision and energy.
Infinity II Reviews
UK Vibe (UK) “Infinity II” is an interesting album with strong performances. The conceptual aim is inspiring, and the recording does offer up some impressive moments… ….For fans of exploratory jazz/ambient hybrids, it’s well worth engaging with – there’s plenty to enjoy here.
Jazz Magazine “His charged, dense, and expressive tone, within an ambitiously constructed blend of jazz, electronics, and ambient music, once again pushes him to refine both his writing and his expansive improvisations, sketching the outlines of sonic landscapes and shifting atmospheres built around cyclical, exploratory forms”
Esensja (Poland) “A forty-minute journey through Eternity… unsettling, soothing, and deeply contemplative.”
Era Jazzu (Poland)
Jazz Views (UK) It’s part of a lineage stretching from Bitches Brew to modern explorations by artists like Nils Petter Molvær and Flying Lotus, where improvisation and electronics blur into atmosphere.
Jazzthing (DE) On a mesh of electronic sounds, finely-meshed, lace-like drum beats and sparingly woven piano chords, the expansive melodic lines of the Sydney-based saxophonist Jeremy Rose unfold. With his quartet — together with pianist Novak Manojlovic, drummer Tully Ryan and Ben Carey on modular synthesiser — his new album Infinity II has now been released, a live recording from the Lazybones Lounge in Marrickville, Sydney.
The exploration of infinity reveals itself in the ever-new possibilities of immersive, minimal sound shifts and sensitive textures that interlock with one another, only to fan out spectrally again — as a meditation on memory, ritual and mindfulness
Project Infinity Live at Phoenix Central Park Reviews
“Riveting improvisations from one of our best composers.” ★★★★1/2, Sydney Morning Herald
“Project Infinity is an unmitigated success.” ★★★★1/2 The Australian
“The Project Infinity band is itself a bit of a supergroup… …this kind of jazz is my jam.” 4ZZZ
Review, 4ZZZ
- I’ve often commented on the progression of jazz from club filling, dancefloor shaking entertainment to the kind of cold, mathematical experimentation that can only happen at the top of ivory towers. Do I have some, lingering, cliched bitterness toward the academy? Possibly, but on a more positive note I’ve been really pleased to hear the sounds of jazz dragged back on to the dancefloor, here in Australia as much as anywhere else. The likes of La Sape records fuse jazz that’s every bit intellectually engaging with four-to-the-floor house and other hip moving rhythms in a way that comes pretty close to satisfying all my needs. Jeremy Rose is a different sort of beast again. Superficially his brand new record Project Infinity: Live At Central Park sounds like something those university professors would sit there and bloodlessly appreciate … but there’s something more. A visceral quality grabs me every time I press play on this one. If Jeremy Rose composed the fundaments of this at the conservatorium (and yes I know this was a performance with a lot of improv), then there was a weird energy playing in the air that day and a slight shaking of the walls. This is jazz of a different kind.
There is precedent for this and you’ll find it in other jazz folks who cross over into the world of alternative music. Rose himself cites as influences Aussie supergroup Tangents and …another Aussie supergroup in The Necks, although god knows what genres and worlds they inhabit; and some people will get very angry if you try and guess. The Project Infinity band is itself a bit of a supergroup, with pianist Novak Manoljovic, a regular player for Ngaiire, ‘tronics man Ben Carey and drummer Tully Ryan of Godtet, a group that every bit belongs with the others mentioned here. Finally, listening to A Shape Of Thought, the opening of the Project Infinity record I get -not all the time- but sometimes, in the multiphonics of Rose’s sax playing, I can’t tell whether he’s blowing on an alto or tenor and I get some of the gritty, deeply pleasurable timbre of Colin Stetson.
Beginning on Excess Of Access it’s much more about those Necks comparisons, for me, as the track deploys cycling patterns of deeply foreboding, skittering and almost minimalist rhythms. It feels like a sense of great unease that you’re trying to suppress, but as it progresses Rose and co. overcome the fear, the harmonies become warmer, friendlier and finally, bursting through the clouds come the sunbursts of sax. It sounds glorious and … almost like Rose is saving the best bits for himself.
Symptoms Of Our Age follows a similar arc and, like a second drink, I’m very much happy to have the same again and at eight minutes, better make it a double. The optimistic ending makes me think that Jeremy Rose has slightly more hope for the future of the world than I do. Not that he’s without his qualms -which it appears no volume of blissful sax can erase- by the time the monolithic emotional discontent of Perturbation arrives. Nearly eleven minutes of those quietly fractured rhythms dance like an uncontrollable attack of neuropathy, prickling the skin. For all of the positive gestures that reconciled early moments in the performance it appears the Infinity Project’s heart is a troubled one. I think there might be a vein of mad science running through it, too: Ben Carey’s electronic additions bleep and bloop like a deranged professor’s laboratory out of a 1950’s sci-fi flick. Did a dose of something mind-bending from the good doctor produce this cold sweat up the back of my neck?
Iterative Semiotics was a great, kind of obvious choice for an early single. The bullish sax brings back those freaky overtones and duels with electronics which sounds like some kind of sine wave generator with syncopated reverb on it. It’s almost a returning echo, after the fact of the eeriness of the jazz, but I think the band can’t wholly help themselves, letting in that hint of funk which energises the cut. Just goes to show there’s almost no problem you can’t shake off on the dancefloor.
I don’t know how a track named Iterative Semiotics got to be so entertaining, but its partner in highfalutin intellectual theory, Heuristics, actually sounds like you would expect and slightly more like Messiaen than jazz for most of its length. Speaking of entertainment, it might just be a product of my endless immaturity but every time I hear it I spend all of the eight minutes of closing cut Memory & Sex interpreting what I hear through the slightly prurient lense of its title. There’s an off-kilter gyration, squelching sounds from the synth bay and ghostly echoes on the sax. It’s got beauty, sadness and a kind of rhythmic repetition that could be a couple going through the motions, trying to stave off the inevitable end. There’s the through-line of that beauty though, which no amount of banality can stave off; perhaps they -and we- can hold on to that part of the memory?
The subdued clapping at the end, reminds you that this has been a live show and adds still more awkwardness to the sexy qualities of what we finished up with. I’m very much not going to let that stop me from saying I really enjoyed this record: the evocative atmosphere, largely provided by the ranks of machines, the crawling, insect-swarm-like rhythms on the drums and keys and the ever-present golden soaring of the sax. Jeremy Rose is a busy man, touring around the world, band-leading, composing and running his own label, Earshift, on which Project Infinity: Live At Phoenix Central Park is being released. I do hope he finds time to put out more records like this though, because this kind of jazz is my jam.
- Chris Cobcroft.