Scott McDowell at Jazz Realities (Substack): "Gorp jazz is fully, or almost fully, or somewhat fully, improvised. It emphasizes silence, decay, and space between notes. The music often unspools slowly or methodically. Reverb, room tone, and the natural setting are important parts of the composition. It favors modal harmony, folk or global rhythms and melodies, polyrhythms and repetition, emotional coolness rather than expressiveness. Depth over drama."
adjacent to ambient jazz and the spiritual jazz revival
"Chord changes and jazz rhythms [take] a back seat to Terry Riley minimalism, repetition, ostinato phrasing, earthiness, and synthesized dots and loops."
BLASTITUDE calls this same strain of jazz "ECM-core" (and notes that "gorp jazz" is "an even worse name than ECM-Core")
McDowell: "Gorp jazz is fully, or almost fully, or somewhat fully, improvised. It emphasizes silence, decay, and space between notes. The music often unspools slowly or methodically. Reverb, room tone, and the natural setting are important parts of the composition. It favors modal harmony, folk or global rhythms and melodies, polyrhythms and repetition, emotional coolness rather than expressiveness. Depth over drama."
see International Anthem's SML:
"SML embraces everything I love about music; it’s improvisational, minimal, repetitive, earthy, jazzy, sautéed in electronics."
BLASTITUDE also calls out International Anthem: "International Anthem is basically the original ECM-core [...] they are like an American ECM of today, something they’ve been building up to for a full decade now."