Jazz Fusion Worth Hearing: Daniel Casares Made Sounds of a Digital City in Two and a Half Days
Jazz Fusion Worth Hearing: Daniel Casares Made Sounds of a Digital City in Two and a Half Days
Eight Short Tracks of Alto Sax, Breakbeats and Glitch From a Spanish Jazz Guitarist
Daniel Casares released Sounds of a Digital City on 10 April 2026. Its eight tracks mix digital hardcore, electronica and experimental jazz. The whole album runs for less than a quarter of an hour. The guitarist from A Coruña, Spain, recorded it in two and a half days. It is the sharpest turn yet on a road that started in the jazz clubs of Boston.
Daniel Casares’s music is in the playlist below, and his full coverage history sits on his artist profile. Sounds of a Digital City came to this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news sites. Give it a listen, then read on for the road that led to it.
From Berklee and Wally’s Jazz Cafe to a Home Studio in Galicia
That road is worth tracing first. Casares studied at the Berklee College of Music from 2014 to 2018, under teachers including Terence Blanchard and Kenny Werner. While he was there, he led a weekly set at Wally’s Jazz Cafe in Boston.
He then spent a year in New York playing as a sideman before moving back to Galicia in 2019. In 2022 he also completed a master’s degree at SOAS University of London. Back home he reconnected with the music he loved before jazz, and his records began to widen. On Idleness (2021) he played every instrument. From a Cabin in the Woods followed in 2023, and 1971 in October 2025.
Production became a bigger part of the work along the way, alongside electronica and experimental hip hop. That path has a famous model in Flying Lotus, who recorded You’re Dead! at home in Los Angeles in 2014. He still brought jazz players such as Herbie Hancock and Kamasi Washington into an electronic record. Casares runs the same idea from the other side, a jazz player who learned to build records himself.
Alto Sax, Breakbeats and an iPhone Sample Make Up Sounds of a Digital City by Daniel Casares
So Sounds of a Digital City is a producer’s record made by an improviser. Casares built it in his own studio in rural Galicia. He started from copyright-free sample libraries and changed those sounds until they fitted. He made it during a difficult period, over two and a half days of working day and night. One session ran from midday until ten the next morning.
Daniel Casares, credited as Daniel Garrido Casares, composed all eight tracks, produced the record and plays the alto saxophone on it. Drums, synths played live on a keyboard and a few recordings from his phone fill out the rest.
The tracks are short and busy. strike up starts from a riff on a distorted synth, with a breakbeat and an alto sax solo on top. engine brings in a fast guitar solo. transforming is the longest at just under three minutes. It sets an unsynchronised jazz drum sample against a breakbeat, so the two pull against each other.
The closest relative here is Naked City, the band John Zorn led in New York from 1988 to 1993. Its 1990 debut album pushed a saxophone-led jazz group through grindcore, punk and surf in short, abrupt bursts. Casares does something similar with samples and breakbeats instead of a full band.
From the MusicDrops.News curator team: “Sounds of a Digital City never wastes a second: eight tracks in under fifteen minutes. The album still finds room for a quiet one in calm madness, and for an ending that dissolves into free jazz on doober.”
After Sounds of a Digital City, Daniel Casares Turned to Longer Tracks on His October Album
Then the pace changed again. On 16 October 2026 the Spanish guitarist released Go!, a seven-track album. Its pieces run from about four to five and a half minutes, far longer than anything on this record.
Titles such as Green Jam, Red Jam and iPhone Rock suggest he is still mixing the studio and the bandstand. He has said he wants to keep blurring the lines between jazz and the other styles he loves. He also wants to stay true to the jazz tradition he trained in.
Six months apart, the two albums show how quickly his catalogue now moves. Sounds of a Digital City remains the compressed, high-pressure entry point, and the newer record shows where that pressure went next.
Listen to Sounds of a Digital City on Bandcamp and Apple Music. Follow Daniel Casares on Spotify, Instagram, his YouTube channel and his website.
About The Author
