Italian jazz fusion duo Varv releases sophomore full-length Transit on Belgian label Off Record, charting an intimate, shape-shifting dialogue between synthetic electronic pulses and improvisation, suspended in a liminal space of endless reinvention and borderless sonic exploration.

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Following their 2024 debut Lowlands, Italian duo Varv—a crossover project featuring Andrea Cappi on keys and Francesco Mascolo on drums—returns to the Belgian Off Record label with their sophomore album, Transit, further expanding their exploration of different musical territories, weaving together contemporary jazz with electronica and subtle echoes of rock.

Across its six tracks, Transit unfolds as an intimate yet kinetic dialogue between the two musicians. Electronic sequences, written structures, and improvisation are interwoven into forms that shift between the open-ended and the tightly controlled, constantly evolving as they move forward. Cappi sculpts pulsating synthetic landscapes, while Mascolo counters with rhythmically intricate phrasing, drawing from a wide palette of influences.

The title Transit indicates a state of passage — a suspended zone where nothing is fixed, where every element hovers in flux, malleable and charged with possibility. The album probes the elastic relationship between contemporary jazz and electronic music: keyboards split duties between basslines, ambient beds, loops, and synth leads, while the drums navigate a richly varied terrain of timbral and rhythmic solutions, generating a continuous interplay of balance and tension.

Opening cut “Bright” detonates like a burst of sonic light. A luminous synth floods the space, while jagged bass figures sketch out an oblique, unpredictable theme beneath it. That radiance gives way to “Wormhole”, which swallows the listener whole — a disorienting vortex stripped of reference points, a chaotic pull into the unstable matter of sound itself.

“Place to Digress” lives up to its name, carving out a zone for drift and deviation: an unbroken synth sequence lays down a minimal grid as the piano slips between tonality and atonality, threading repeating fragments over which the drums crash in with rock-tinged insistence. The mood turns seductive on “Vice”, where a simple, almost lyrical theme undergoes temporal erosion — stretching from a groove-driven pulse into a gradual deceleration, before resurfacing in a newly reconfigured metric frame, anchored by a muscular synth-bass sequence.

“Arkose” taps into something more primal: a stripped-down motif introduces two bass ostinatos — one underpinning the theme and keyboard solo, the other driving the drum feature. From a bed of warm, immersive tones, a coarse synth lead emerges, carving through the mix like a jagged shard of rock cutting into the earth’s core. Closing track “Drifters’ Deal” completes the arc — a pact among cosmic wanderers. Layers of keyboard loops overlap and entangle, drifting into a hypnotic, destinationless journey where repetition becomes the governing principle. It’s a space beyond inquiry, where motion replaces meaning, and the only rule is a tacit agreement not to interfere.

Transit is an immersive, unstable sonic passage — a continuum of evolving sequences and primordial textures tracing the outer edges of electro-acoustic nu jazz, a quiet cosmic drift into the unknown for those willing to listen closely..