Underground Spiritual Game is a Brooklyn trio with no chord instrument in it: baritone saxophone, electric bass and drums, and nothing else. The three men playing them had already spent years together in a seven-piece band. Ran Livneh, Eran Fink and Eden Bareket all hold chairs in the Anbessa Orchestra, the Brooklyn group that plays Ethiopian funk alongside originals written on Ethiopian material. The trio is what happens when three of those seven walk away from the rest of the horn section and the keyboards. Livneh describes the aim on his own site as exploring "the relationship of tone and atmosphere over musical forms, nature and abstraction," which in practice means the band writes short figures and repeats them.

The name is borrowed. The Underground Spiritual Game is a Fela Kuti compilation released September 7, 2004 on Quannum Projects, twelve tracks selected and mixed by Chief Xcel of Blackalicious. Rhythm Passport, writing about the trio in January 2026, read the borrowing as a declaration of Afrobeat intent, and the music supports that reading: the bass figures cycle rather than walk, and the drums hold a groove rather than mark time.

Livneh is the bandleader, and the member with the longest paper trail as a leader. He took a Bachelor of Arts in classical double bass performance at the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem under Michael Klinghoffer, then studied privately with Ben Street, William Parker and, in counterpoint, Judith Berkson. In New York he has worked with the Benin-born guitarist Kaleta (Leon Ligan-Majek, a Fela Kuti alumnus), Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Stephen Ulrich of Big Lazy, the singers Liraz and Gili Yalo, the griot Ismael Kouyate and the guitarist Tamar Eisenman. He leads or co-leads three other projects besides this one: the trio dustlights on Ropeadope, Tea Masters on Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit and the double bass quartet Adnata Ensemble on Fallen Moon Recordings. He also plays in Habbina Habbina, the Mediterranean surf and Middle Eastern psych band built around the guitarist Amit Peled.

Eran Fink came out of the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Israel and then Berklee College of Music, where he studied with Ralph Peterson Jr., Hal Crook, Bob Gulotti and Jamey Haddad. He moved to New York in 2011 and has worked the city's jazz, R&B, Ethiopian and Afro-Cuban circuits since, alongside a parallel career as a staff accompanist for dance classes at the Alvin Ailey School and the Martha Graham School. Bareket, the third, is an Argentine-born Israeli baritone specialist with three trio albums of his own on Fresh Sound New Talent and a long sideman list.

The band's records come out on Vibromonk, which is both a Brooklyn studio and a label, and the arrangement is closer than a normal artist-label deal. Vibromonk Records, Inc. was registered as a New York corporation on December 7, 1998, and the studio was co-founded by the engineer Dan Shatzky with the Israeli drummer and producer Tamir Muskat of Balkan Beat Box, according to Muskat's Wikipedia entry. As a label Vibromonk issued three rock records and then went quiet: two by The Penniless Wilds in 1997 and 2000, and Shot'nez's Shot'nez Untested in 2003. Nothing followed for more than twenty years. Underground Spiritual Game's 7" single restarted the catalogue in 2024, and Shatzky produced both of the band's releases with Livneh.

That single, Above Ground / Notes (Vibromonk vm2102-45), came out May 10, 2024, recorded at Vibromonk Studios, plated at GZ Media and pressed by Precision Record Pressing. The band played Barbès in Park Slope the following night, billed as "The Underground Spiritual Game & special guests." Its sleeve set the visual template the album kept: a paper collage by Stephen Warwick, laid out by Sophie Cooke, with the band name broken across four lines in white and the titles in acid yellow.

The debut LP Of Time followed on September 12, 2025 (vm2103-33), eight tracks and twenty-eight minutes, cut from an analog master and pressed on translucent black vinyl in a tip-on jacket. The two sides of the 7" were folded in as tracks A2 and A3. The back sleeve carries the entire credit list in four lines: "Eden Bareket, Baritone Sax / Eran Fink, Drums / Ran Livneh, Bass," then "Made by Underground Spiritual Game at Vibromonk. Produced by Dan Shatzky with Ran Livneh." There are no guests, no engineer credit and no recording dates. The runout groove is stamped MASTERDISK. Discogs files the record under Jazz, with the styles Contemporary Jazz, Afrobeat and Free Jazz.

The trio has worked steadily in Brooklyn without touring much. Its earliest documented date is December 13, 2023 at Sisters in Clinton Hill, on a bill with the Yonatan Peled Quintet, five months before the single. Two-set nights at Bar LunÀtico in Bed-Stuy followed on October 3, 2024 and September 2, 2025, and the band played the Pine Grove Porch stage at Barbès in the Woods, the festival Laudable Productions runs at Race Brook Lodge in the Berkshires, in November 2024. The New York City Jazz Record's October 2025 calendar lists the trio at Nublu 151 on Thursday, October 9, 2025, sharing a $20 bill with the Eden Har-Gil Quartet, in which Bareket also played that night.

The trio's method is subtraction. Working without a chordal instrument, Livneh's bass supplies both the harmony and the loop, usually a short cell repeated with small variations, while Fink plays around it in irregular groupings rather than driving it, and Bareket's baritone takes the whole register above them. The material is built from Ethiopian scales and rhythmic patterns and from Moroccan melodic lines, with the cyclical pull of Afrobeat underneath and free-jazz phrasing on top, which is how the same eight compositions can be described as both danceable and meditative. Secret Eclectic's February 2026 review placed the record in Mulatu Astatke's lineage and singled out Fink's playing as "beatifully organic," praising drumming that sits in unconventional time signatures without announcing them. Rhythm Passport made the structural point more plainly: the pieces are concise enough that improvisation changes phrasing and intensity rather than form.