
Gearbox Records
Latest Release

Liza Lo, Familiar (out 1.31.25)
Latest Release

Elliot Galvin, The Ruin (out 2.8.25)
Latest Release

Cahill/Costello, out 11.8.24
Credit: Photo credit is Harrison Reid. Visuals Direction Niki Zaupa
Download Photos
Videos
Press
About
Liza Lo Artist Bio
Brought up between the Netherlands, England and Spain, Liza is influenced by a wide variety of music. Inspiration for Liza ranges from Laura Marling, Big Thief and Carole King to Billie Marten, Maro and Flyte. Growing up, Liza was surrounded by flamenco music, played live by family and friends at home. This love for playing and sharing music in a community sparked a love for guitar playing and intimate story telling. A few years later, being mentored by Jon Kelly, who worked with incredible artists like Kate Bush and Paul McCartney, has pushed Liza to record her songs with her entire live band. The band, Liza and Jon set off to Studio 13 in West London and recorded ‘Familiar’ direct to tape. A lesson in learning to accept impurities in a recording and choosing the song for the feeling of the take, rather than the perfection of the recording. Jon and Liza sat down weekly, going through Liza’s newly written songs and were together collecting the right ones for the album over the course of 10 months. The band came together and jammed the songs in the studio for the first time, just before recording them, trusting everyone’s initial instinct with the songs and allowing an element of surprise whilst recording.
More stripped back songs like A Messenger and Darling carry the core of Lo’s inspiration, keeping the songs as simple as possible, to just convey the message of the song was the goal here. Whereas bigger songs like Morning Call, Catch The Door and Gipsy Hill were developed thoroughly with the whole band and more inspired by bands like Big Thief or Flyte, to bring together a sonic field that supported the song but also where the instrumentation led the writing.
Liza Lo Artist Statement
Jon became my mentor at the start of 2023, he told me lots of stories about his time recording Paul McCartney and Kate Bush, Jon being an obvious, incredible inspiration to me. I was studying music production at the time and was lucky enough to have met Jon in a masterclass about mixing. I played him multiple demo’s and we spoke a lot about my live band and Jon and I started speaking about what it’d look like to record with all of them in the studio I had access to during my studies, and so we did. Meeting the team at Gearbox and having Jon as my mentor allowed me to trust in this new way of recording my songs. We brought the music to life by focusing on one main element: to keep it live, so we brought the whole band together in the studio. We recorded the songs direct to tape at Damon Albarn’s Studio 13 in West-London and Sean Hargreaves’ studio in Camden. I’d written all the songs and brought them to Jon and we’d together decide which ones were worth trialling with the band and which ones I needed to finish writing. It was honestly the most fruitful of times.
Chihei Hatakeyama Bio
Shun Ishiwaka Bio
Bio – Darrel Sheinman, Gearbox Records
A drummer from the age of 13, Darrel played in various punk bands before moving to jazz, groove, and funk. Whilst pursuing successful careers as a commodities trader and maritime security professional, Darrel continued to nurture his passion for music via his habitual crate-digging for rare, original Blue Note pressings and a strong addiction to high fidelity audio. In 2009, this led to a change in career path and the beginnings of Gearbox Records.
Initial Gearbox output stemmed from Darrel’s explorations of the British Library archives, which led to a slew of first-time commercial releases from cult British jazz icons that included saxophonist legend Tubby Hayes and pianist Michael Garrick. Under the mentorship of famed engineers Sean Davies, Darrel was inspired to build an all-analogue cutting and mastering studio based around vintage vacuum tube tape machines and a 1967 Haeco Scully lathe, to which one can attribute the signature “Gearbox sound.” More recently and under Darrel’s A&R leadership, Gearbox has been at the forefront of the UK contemporary jazz revival, having released music with acts such as Binker & Moses, Theon Cross, and Sarathy Korwar. As well as jazz, Gearbox has evolved organically into other genres and styles of music, from Brazilian no wave to ambient electronic to lo-fi soul, with a focus on quality being the deciding factor.
A frequent visitor to Japan, Darrel holds a black belt in kobudo martial art practices, something that he shares with legendary pianist and Gearbox signing Abdullah Ibrahim. His admiration and appreciation of Japanese culture led him to introduce monthly “kissaten”-styled listening sessions to the Gearbox studio, open to the public, which proved popular and have resulted in a monthly residency on London’s Soho Radio show.
Ever the entrepreneur, Darrel opened a Gearbox Japan office in Spring 2020, making Gearbox one of the first ever independent labels to do so.