#experimental-music

#experimental-music

Classical music begins with blood and guts. The first violins were strung with sheep intestines, while early timpanis bore heads made from goatskin. The conservatory-bound spend years blistering, bruising, and contorting themselves, sometimes to the point of permanent damage.

Swell Maps were a punk band, but only because that word meant something different when they started making records in 1977. It didn't mean bands called Knuckleheadz or Gimp Fist; it meant unfettered freedom, curiosity rather than rage. Theirs was a music that wandered off in unexpected directions, where songs barely hung together before falling apart, punctuated by peculiar sounds made by whatever happened to be around.

With slow songs from the heart and thrashing experiments that deconstruct and glitch flamenco, reggaeton, rap, and breakbeat, the collective has gained a following in Spain's underground and even rubbed shoulders with its mainstream.

End Of Summer features falsetto voices, bowed cello, feedback tones, synth drones and various electronics, blending and melting into each other's timbres. Robert Lowe is involved in "Part 1" and "Part 3", the latter with multi-tracked harmonic lines utilising nasal intonations to accent frequencies in waves of filtered resonance.

The record sits atop the coupling of two core groups that Frisell has worked with over the years: His bandmates here are Jenny Scheinmann (violin), Eyvind Kang (viola), and Hank Roberts (cello)-aka 858 Quartet, the guitarist's go-to string section-and Thomas Morgan (bass) and Rudy Royston (drums). In some sense, In My Dreams is the musical equivalent of a conversation between friends at a birthday party.

When people talk about the quintessential music of early 2000s New York, it's often scuzzy new rock bands like The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the burgeoning dance-punk scene led by LCD Soundsystem, or the city's ever-booming hip hop movement. But there's arguably one album that in its own quietly revolutionary way, may just be the most significant work of that city's fertile period: Basinski's The Disintegration Loops.

"I just make stuff until it sounds right," said Norwegian experimental musician Gaute Granli in a 2021 interview, when asked about his creative intentions. His answer is both evasive-what would it mean, when crafting deliberately confrontational art, to release something you think sounds wrong?-and an accurate description of a practice shaped by enigmatic instincts. Granli's curious new album Rosacea has a nebulous atmosphere all its own.

FRI/30-SUN/1: PIVOT FESTIVAL The 11th annual installment of this incredible boundary-pushing music festival has enlisted Andy Meyerson of the excellent Living Earth Show duo to curate-and boy is he bringing it. (If you haven't grokked Living Earth's terrific Roar Shack venue, hop to it, btw.) The weekend fills Herbst Theater with hyper-San Franciscan sounds, with performances by vocalist Tanner Porter, San Francisco Ballet dancer- choreographer Myles Thatcher, and Bay Area ensembles Bucket List (featuring composer-creator Mark Applebaum),

In March 2025, the UK experimental music scene was pleasantly surprised when London venue Cafe Oto got a mention at the Oscars. Daniel Blumberg, who won an Oscar for the score for The Brutalist, used his acceptance speech to pay tribute to the East London venue and its community of "hard working, radical musicians, who've been making uncompromising music for many years" (the soundtrack features the likes of Seymour Wright, Evan Parker and Steve Noble).

Friends After Good Sound are a newcomer to Portland's experimental music scene. They are a collective of young, queer composers and performers that exclusively play works composed for them by Portland-based composers. Their approach to music has a gaiety and a wicked sense of humor. Hence their name, which abbreviates to a reclaimed slur for queer people. The name is clearly meant to ruffle some feathers, acting as a shibboleth separating the gays and their allies

Ivo Dimchev, the provocative Bulgarian performance artist, choreographer, and musician, is celebrated as an "enfant terrible." His performances are an electrifying blend of physicality and genre-defying artistry, daringly delving into the complexities of sex, power, and desire. With a captivating mix of vocals, dramatic expressions, and striking staging, Dimchev pushes the limits of artistic expression, leaving audiences both dazzled and entranced.

By that, I meant work that doesn't seek to explain itself, not out of a pretentious desire to keep people out but more out of an inner intensity, a desire to enmesh you within its concept-world by experience rather than sitting and pointing and lecturing about any given thing in the book. Music, it turns out, is the best way to make this clear; songs, especially truly great ones, don't explain their emotional character to you but instead make you feel it.

On July 7, 2025, Lucrecia Dalt's heart stopped. She had suffered a severe epileptic seizure, and eight seconds would pass before it resumed beating. The next day, the Colombian musician released " caes," the third single from her breathtaking new album A Danger to Ourselves -a song that suggests, she says, "that the sublime can be reached through surrendering to the act of falling." For two days after her near-death experience, she soared, so overwhelmed by the beauty of her surroundings that she wondered if she had actually died and was experiencing the afterlife. She hadn't, of course, and the world that wowed her was the same one she occupied before her heart had stopped. She had just surrendered to the fall.

The evening began as the audience filled their seats, a DJ booth with glowing, orange lights visible in the darkness. A dark, shadowy figure appeared behind white fabric hung across the stage. As music created by the live DJ sounded, the figure moved a glowing orb. It played with depth of shadow until morphing into two distinct figures. The delicate electronica soundscape matched the dark whimsy of the scene, indicating a moist forest atmosphere.

Charmaine Lee uses her voice as a tool for expression, creating a unique musical language that incorporates elements reminiscent of experimental electronics and noise music.

Giant Opening Mouth on the Ground, releasing on August 8, features 33-minutes of music recorded in 2014, dating back more than a decade, and showcases a unique collaborative process.

"What they heard when they put the new album on their turntables was nothing, absolutely nothing but screaming feedback noise recorded at various frequencies, played back against various other noise layers."

A Ghanian highlife legend and Pattie Gonia's environmental drag will ensure a sparkling atmosphere during a week of unique events at the Crystal Ballroom.

Sync opens the EP with stretched and delayed cowbells, creating a pulsing analogue rhythm that welcomes listeners into a deep ambient experience.

"There’s been a lot of memories," Shaff says about working with the archive. He described the process as "almost too personal."

Delia Derbyshire, a pioneer of electronic music, showed how tape machines could transform sound in 1965, influencing the future of radiophonic art.

The reissued live recordings of Arthur Russell encapsulate his unique melodic sensibility, showcasing a performance where his voice and cello create an ethereal experience.

Kali Malone's music intertwines expansive, slowly moving compositions with vibrant tones that transform the listener's experience into an enveloping soundscape.

The String Queens challenge the norm by blending classical, contemporary, and experimental styles, highlighting women’s empowerment in a male-dominated music landscape.