Shoving into the world in 2021 with the intense Blackhaine collaboration ‘Did U Cum Yet / I’m Not Gonna Cum’, Hull-born sonic and visual artist Richie Culver (AKA Quiet Husband) has been feverishly recording and releasing music like a man possessed ever since.
His 2024 outing for Drowned By Locals, Religious Equipment, claimed the album of the week slot here at the Quietus. There was something insular and paranoid about that record. Like it was trying to keep the world out. The Architecture of Perception (only his 4th release since the start of this year, the slacker), by contrast, feels outward-looking. It’s spacious, atmospheric. The opening track ‘Composition’ is like standing outside of a club in the sticky heat of the night.
Category: experimental
DoYeon Kim works in a space informed by jazz and free improvisation, imbued with vestiges of folk music. She plays a gayageum, a plucked zither, which is not an instrument normally found in these contexts. Joining Kim are violist Mat Maneri, bassist Henry Fraser and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. The musicians are well attuned, bringing out detailed interactions between subsets of the group and the quartet as a whole.
The opening track, “The Beats of Distant Thunder,” is a case in point, with Kim and Maneri beginning the proceedings in the lead, only to have Fraser and Sorey lock in a double time groove that spurs the action further forward. Maneri and Fraser trade solos, and Kim plucks a line imitating Sorey’s use of cymbals. The whole group brings…
As Michael Cloud Duguay points out, church organs are the only instruments that form part of a building. Organs only play in the place where they were constructed, and people come to them if they want to listen.
Duguay is a composer and producer from Ontario, and he describes Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go as “almost” a documentary about organs. Using recordings made during a nine-day road trip around the remote fringes of Newfoundland, the album is built around the sounds of organs in seven different churches – in places called things like Agathuna, Bonavista and Cupids.
Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go is a complex, multi-layered album with a strong documentary flavour – not only bringing these crumbling…
Cellist and composer Janel Leppin returns with Slowly Melting, the simultaneously released solo companion to her Ensemble Volcanic Ash: Pluto in Aquarius set. Leppin plays cello, guitar, bass, a Prophet-Five synth, and piano in compositions, improvisations, and soundscapes for cello. Over eight pieces recorded at The Brink in Richmond, Virginia, and one at Janel’s Room studio, she articulates a genreless space where her own musical obsessions including jazz, chamber music, experimental improvisation, and rock, become a holistic entity greater than the individual parts.
Opener “Zonk” weds plucked cello strings, guitar, droning synth, and distortion; Leppin finds subtle melodies that emerge under the primary theme; spaces and textures wind around…
New York-based percussionist and sound artist Lesley Mok describes her music as “a passage through affective zones.” A phrase that carries a cinematic charge, the soundworld she’s created is not unlike the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker: oppressive, mysterious, and existing outside the confines of conventional spatio-temporality. Navigating the friction between digital electronics and analogue percussion, while drawing on her jazz and free-improvisation background, each track plays like a scene from a film unfurling in darkness. berserk opens with a rain of metallic chimes, its rhythm unstable, seemingly sentient. midland unsettles further: an industrial hum yields to irradiated clicks, conjuring a landscape both dangerous and alluring.
Hiding your identity is a bold move in 2026. In this year of stalker glasses and flock cameras and algorithmic analysis of every internet move you make, it might seem futile to try to keep your name out of things. But Ferries, based who knows where and comprised of who knows how many or what sort of people, is doing its level best.
Aside from a modest (and cagey) Bandcamp page, the band has left very little internet trail. Assuming this secrecy is an intentional decision, it’s certainly working; their sound is the only objective info we’ve got.
About that sound: it’s slow and dubby, its cavernous sonic space encompassing body-shaking low-end and dreamy, trebly vocals. You might point to the Mekons’ most…
Brighton on the English South Coast has always been weird. It was built almost from scratch as a hedonistic playground by the foppish Prince Regent, later King George IV, just over 200 years ago — and ever since has attracted waves of freaks, cultists, ravers, lowlifes, and oddballs. Nowadays, it’s beset by gentrification, chain restaurants, media folk and wellness gurus, but just under the surface it still has the air of “a town that is constantly helping the police with their enquiries” as the writer Keith Waterhouse put it in the 1970s. And now, as ever, hidden away from the seafront clubs and big indie gigs, it has a wellspring of genuine eccentricity clinging on to its surreality in basement flats, weird jam sessions above pubs, smelly poetry readings, and weird…
Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto recorded Lichtung after the married couple decided to settle down near Berlin, close to where Hacke grew up, after living a nomadic lifestyle for 14 years. The album also marks the duo’s first since Hacke left industrial pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten, the group he joined as a teenager in 1981. In some ways, particularly due to the vocals, which are entirely sung in German this time around, Lichtung actually sounds closer to Neubauten than hackedepicciotto‘s previous work. Hacke re-incorporates electronic experiments similar to the ones he made as a youth, before he joined the group. Several of the songs take the form of slow-moving, sorrowful dirges with weeping strings and drone metal guitars.
In 2016, with the blessing of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, Xiu Xiu released and toured the surprisingly successful album and concert, Plays the Music of Twin Peaks. Out of respect and deference to the beloved series, the band decided to put the concert to rest in 2018. After the recent and untimely passing of David Lynch, Xiu Xiu began to receive several high-profile requests to revive their interpretation of this iconic music. However, in wanting to always try to follow, honor, and continue to be inspired by the incredibly high bar of artistic challenge set by David Lynch, Xiu Xiu is instead going deeper.
Eraserhead Xiu Xiu is a new live concert with accompanying film & full-length album that uses field recordings, concert specific homemade…
At first glance the sleeve’s photo shows an overhead shot of a manhole cover, with a pair of lace-up boots next to it. Closer inspection shows the pattern on the sewer grate could come from a Vasarely painting: a grid of raised metal circles of carefully ordered sizes form a globe-like image in its centre, seeming to pulsate or spin. This manhole cover was photographed by EarthBall in Geneva. Maybe they felt the primeval force that its image suggested was coming up to meet them at the gig. Do EarthBall make music that mirrors Vasarely’s idea of the “plastic alphabet” where geometrics make a visual language that “communicates, across cultures”, a language that can be assembled in any form, anywhere?
Their new album, Actual Earth Music Vol. 3 & 4,…
Alexander Noice makes music that is full of complexity yet also full of mirth. On his 2019 album NOICE (also the name of the ensemble he gathered for that record), his guitar work joined forces with alto saxophone, bass, drums (both acoustic and programmed) and the twin vocals of Karina Kallas and Argenta Walther as they worked their way through Noice’s knotty but endlessly catchy compositions.
…On Perpetually and Forever, Noice handles the lion’s share of the instrumentation, credited with guitar, piano, synths, vocals, and programming, with saxophones, flute, and bass clarinet added to a few of the tracks. While the somewhat “one-person band” status of the record may lead other artists to adopt a more minimalist…
Fans of experimental solo guitar records have been having a good year. The spring brought a new record by avant-jazz/power ambient guru David Torn and a career-spanning comp of madcap inventor Hans Reichel’s work. Now, Bill Orcutt’s Palilalia label gives us two LPs’ worth of gnarled fission and warped disputation from German provocateur Olaf Rupp. Rupp released a tribute to Reichel in 2020, NOBEACH, in which he captured his countryman’s pastoral eccentricities and bizarre tonal menagerie exactly. On collaborative albums like 2010’s The Specter of Genius with drummer Michael Wertmuller, Rupp plays with a whiplike velocity, echoing the thorny barrage of avant-guitar saint Derek Bailey. On Fuzzy Logic, he’s operating in a slower, more viscous mode,…
In the ‘80s, F/i was so underground that even their founder, Richard Franecki, didn’t have copies of their earliest albums. “I don’t really count those in our discography, since they were privately issued under our fake ‘Uddersounds’ label,” he has said. The group eventually found modest success — a series of albums on the much-respected noise label RRRecords, European tours, shows with Hawkwind and Acid Mothers Temple — but in those early days, F/i recorded cassettes to trade rather than sell, swapping single copies for material from like-minded bands. 1985’s Invisible Men is the holy grail of this era, a tape so rare that they didn’t even bother releasing it on a fake label.
Franecki came up through Milwaukee’s tiny punk scene in the late ‘70s, playing in bands…
Purgate’s latest release, Leavings, has a simple yet effective formula. Take a short abstract motif, and let it loop for a few minutes.
These motifs, however, are synthesized from melodic fragments, static, distortion, and other unusual features. And the looping varies each of them slightly across iterations.
Purgate is Frederic Arbour, also known as the label head for Cyclic Law. Thus, he is intimately familiar with dark ambient, industrial, and adjacent genres of music. His efforts on this album only provide a respectful nod toward those established forms before heading out in new directions.
‘Cinders’ opens the album with shards of airy, floating synth grounded by a pulsing rhythm. ‘Ashes’ is even more focused on repeating,..
Félicia Atkinson’s sound collages — ever-expanding webs of electronics, field recordings, spoken word, and piano — seem to haunt the spaces they occupy, draping themselves in every corner like an otherworldly presence. With SANS VISAGE, the French composer’s new score for Georges Franju’s 1960 film Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face), she leans into her music’s ghostliness, using delicate layers of airy electronics to conjure the film’s looming dread and pairing contrasting textures to meditate on the invisible and visible bars that trap us.
The Belgian cultural center Viernulvier approached Atkinson to create the score as part of its Videodroom series; the recorded version pares the full 90-minute score down to…
Helen Svoboda‘s latest is in the lost tradition of album as journey. Announcing itself like glaring daybreak, it pulls you down into the depths of its own nocturnal dreamworld, one of dusky beauty and clammy tension.
This shift is skilfully done, the album’s opening third slowly shifting from the gently off-centre but relatively linear ‘If’ and ‘Child’ into something more sunken and strange, the album’s final stretch forming an almost uncomfortably raw three-part howl of dissonance.
Svoboda has created an interesting sound world, one of spartanly recorded bowed double bass pushed into the panicky clamour of nightmares, as on ‘Solo’, or soothing, as it is on the swooning ‘Chords’. That said, as the album…
Dewa Alit, master of radical Balinese gamelan, returns to Black Truffle with Baur Bentur. Genetic (2020) introduced international listeners to the magical sound-world of Alit’s Gamelan Salukat, who perform on instruments tuned to a unique scale derived from modified versions of two traditional Balinese scales. The two pieces heard on Chasing the Phantom (2022) further demonstrated his radical fusion of tradition and experimentation, with passages where unorthodox techniques make the acoustic ensemble resemble glitching electronics. Baur Bentur now highlights another aspect of Alit’s work, presenting pieces composed in 2024 and 2025 where Gamelan Salukat performs alongside virtuoso pianist Sri Hanuraga. Alit’s music is grounded in deep…
When does jazz become more than a set of tools and techniques, and what is the crucial element that makes it into its own unmistakable form?
Jazz musicians have pushed against the genre since at least the days of the big bands, and Miles Davis’s guitarist Pete Cosey once declared jazz “a dirty word.” Yet the teeming nocturnes of Duke Ellington and the melted grooves of On the Corner are both jazz, despite the misgivings of their creators. On his latest release, Finnish musician Vladislav Delay (born Sasu Ripatti) utilizes the basic equipment of jazz but ends up with something undeniably different.
Delay has been around since the ’90s, operating mostly in various shades of electronic (abstract glitch, collaged house, minimal…
On Music for Tombak & Synth, Paris-based Iranian musician Cinna Peyghamy transforms a technical experiment into something deeply personal. What began as research into contact microphones and live improvisation gradually evolved into a meditation on exile, double identity, and inherited memory. The dialogue between the Persian tombak and modular synthesis — “a piece of wood and skin” confronting a hyper-technological electronic system — becomes both sonic method and autobiographical metaphor.
The album’s greatest strength lies in the extra- ordinary physicality of its sound design. Peyghamy gives space to every resonance, allowing intricate rhythmic patterns, modular modulation, and acoustic textures to breathe and…
Cloud Machines is the extraordinary debut collaboration between M.C. Schmidt of legendary electronic duo Matmos and John Berndt, the Baltimore avant-garde institution and band leader behind High Zero Festival, the Red Room collective, Geodesic Gnome, and radical sonic concepts like Spectral Relay (a bespoke signal processing architecture) and Relabi (a conceptual genre defined by a Rorschach-blot pulse). After more than one hundred combined years of this pair pushing the boundaries of what music can be and where it can come from, these two iconoclasts have delivered something genuinely unexpected: an oddly sweet electronic opus that’s as immediately engaging as it is a series of delicious puzzles. When two of experimental music’s most…