Montreal’s BIG|BRAVE recorded in grief or in hope at producer Seth Manchester’s Machines with Magnets studio, with touring bassist Liam Andrews contributing to the group’s recording sessions for the first time. The result is the most texturally detailed, sonically overwhelming BIG|BRAVE record to date. Nearly every moment is bristling with blown-out distortion, yet it’s shaped so that there’s enough space for all the elements to breathe instead of cancel each other out.
On opener “what may be the kindest way to leave,” waves of doom-laden noise set in, with Robin Wattie’s manipulated vocals floating in the center, and when the bass pierces through towards the end, the impact is felt deeply. Then, “a shape of shame” gently rocks back and…
Category: experimental
Often, a single sentence can say more than a manifesto spanning several pages. Especially when it is repeated, rewritten, and allowed to take on a life of its own. A phrase written two centuries ago can suddenly sound like a commentary on the present. A handful of words can become a refrain, an axis around which entirely new meanings begin to accumulate.
Horse Lords’ new album begins with such a phrase. Drawn from the nineteenth-century hymn, published in The Sacred Harp – one of the most enduring traditions of American sacred music – the line “We seek a city yet to come” becomes the album’s conceptual and sonic centre of gravity. Sung by Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor, it is looped, stretched, fragmented, and subjected…
Listening to Magazine feels like speedrunning a tour of the circles of hell. The band doesn’t even try to make these songs sum up to anything coherent: each song hits, fades, and the next introduces itself, just to fade again in record time. On each, synthesist Jack Tobias puts down ominous chords and motifs at the worst moments; guitarist-that-sounds-like-a-synthesist Saguiv Rosenstock plays what could very well be the transposed sheet music of a dying dog’s final whimpers; vocalist Zack Borzone moans against the beat in broken Revelations-inspired word association poetry; and drummer Sam Pickard works like the devil to hold the whole operation together. Right when you get accustomed to one song’s palate, it pauses, waits a few seconds,…
KOGG is Cerys Hogg and Selena Kay, who both teach music. With backgrounds in jazz improvisation and classical composition, respectively, they found a common interest in exploring randomness and new ways to make sounds, including building their own instruments. They describe collecting whistles from Christmas crackers and creating a device to blow them with air bulbs. Programming devised sounds into synthesisers, they have crafted their own music, and it is quite something.
As they point out, experimental music has a reputation for being a male business, and a serious one. Hogg and Kay set out to make music their own way, and the results are joyous. The opening track, ‘Reel’, is conceptually satisfying,…
In the grand tradition of left-of-center rock bands, Neptune started as an art project. In the 1990s, Boston sculptor Jason Sanford began fashioning homemade guitars and basses out of scrap metal and repurposed detritus, and the band quickly followed (check out their first ever show in 1994). Over the ensuing years, Sanford (who also plays in E with Thalia Zedek) bolted Neptune into a tight and ferocious noise rock unit that brandished very heavy instruments adorned with blades, spikes, and jagged edges. When George Miller made Mad Max: Fury Road, he dropped the ball by not showcasing Neptune riding the Doof Wagon. (Sure, Coma-Doof Warrior was impressive but Neptune as the harbingers of the apocalypse would have killed.) Because of the construction of…
Did David Torn steal Lou Reed’s band? Probably not — the members of Torn’s early 1980s fusion ensemble Everyman Band, who released two albums on the storied ECM label, have all played with the Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal during in the late ’70s, but Reed had a notoriously mercurial relationship to personnel. Still, a budding jazz guitarist (Torn was mentored by pioneering trumpeter Don Cherry) joining forces with a rock icon’s sidemen for his recording debut shows a strong independent streak and no small amount of ambition. In the four decades since, Torn has delivered on that promise, producing a bewildering wealth of expansive music, from “arrogant ambient” (his term) to EDM (under the alias Splattercell) to acid jazz (check out his work with saxophonist…
Thirst, originally released in 1981 is a stone-cold post-punk classic. While still retaining the sharp experimental edge of their debut, White Souls in Black Suits, Thirst stretches out and offers up some cleaner and more hooky moments as it moves away from pure improvisation. “Between White Souls and Thirst, the guitarist changed from David Hammond to Paul Widger,” explains Newton. “David introduced the perfect guitar sound for DVA, whereas Paul brought in a more rhythmic style more towards early Ry Cooder. The material we were developing was a more defined series of pieces, more structured and exact than the improvised works on White Souls.”
45 years on from its original release (on Fetish), it’s a record from the era that sounds like no other.
Chicago-based sound artist Kikù Hibino collaborates with Japanese noise pioneer Merzbow (Masami Akita) on Rococo ∞ Echomatter, released by Superpang. Exchanging material between Chicago and Tokyo, the duo cuts spoken voice and instruments into dense noise fields.
The album opens like a thunderstorm. The voice that echoes around you (Alexandra Cupsa’s ASMR-modulated French vocals) becomes the green-gray sky, and suddenly, there are flickering tremors of distorted chaos, coming at you in bursts, like lightning. You hear the sounds of a tape rewinding, appropriately enough, since the album starts with the end (‘dB.XYZ’) and ends with the beginning (‘abcdefg’), as if the whole thing is being played backwards. ‘dB.XYZ’ in particular…
As we pick our way through the scurf and scree of the modern world, outraged and numbed at every turn, we can maybe agree that Russell Haswell’s new record, Let It Go, is a useful corrective and something of an unlikely balm. Here, with Haswell at the controls, we are just living in a world of shit, some of us are in the gutter but looking at the kerb, we’ve just roasted an Alsatian’s leg in our thirtieth-floor apartment, and so on.
Let It Go is a total heap of noise and openly addresses the listener as such. That’s the record’s narrative, and its liberation; our irritating anthropological longings to join the dots or see patterns can do one. Opening track, ‘Exit Downwards’ is a recording of an old, forgotten overheating generator doing its own…
Trying to make instrumental albums that, as an entity, do not stick to a specific genre, but at the same time have their own identity and character, is not something a faint-hearted artist should attempt to do. More simply put, such albums are an excellent recipe for a disaster because you have to have a full grasp of what you are attempting to do, as well as being truly knowledgeable about the genres you are trying to mix and match in such an attempt.
That is exactly what NYC artist Jason Vitelli is trying to do on amply titled 2. No Wave Gaze, a second in his series of thematic albums (his fifth overall) that started with 1. Ambient Corridors is supposed to continue with an album focused on classical pieces and will be recorded live.
…Music of the Terrazoku: Ethnographic Recordings from an Imagined Future is the brainchild of drummer-composer Will Glaser, who has assembled a wide array of experimental musicians to help him execute his vision. There’s pretty much everything here, from ambience to industrial music, free improv to early 20th-century jazz. The idea is that such musicians have lived through a climactic event that has wiped away all reference points, and are recreating music from scratch, a metaphor for rebuilding a fractured society.
The very first sounds are like a Geiger counter and a human playing on found containers before breaking into an array of junk drums: just what one might expect for the re-origins of music. Isn’t this how our primitive ancestors started?
With Aves de Nahá, Bosque Vacío turn from the fractured wetlands of Mexico City toward the dense cosmologies of the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas. Where 2023’s Cantera Oriente traced the unstable boundaries between quarry, reserve and megapolis — a site where nature exists in continuous dialogue with urbanism — this new work listens further back and further outward.
Asphalt gives way to canopy; infrastructural hum yields to breath, feather, omen.
Developed through an exchange between anthropology, ornithology and the Lacandon community of Nahá, the album situates birds not as documentary field-recording subjects but as sentient presences embedded in ritual, subsistence and prophecy. Crucially, they are…
Ava Mendoza is simply one of the best guitarists around today. She has played with a murderer’s row of improvisers and experimentalists over the last 20 years, across styles incorporating rock, blues, jazz, bluegrass, metal, and the avant-garde.
…Alive Alone, Alive Together collects Mendoza’s recent live recordings from four different events. Half are duets with drummer Hamid Drake from the Summer Bummer Festival in Antwerp, while the rest are solo performances from the US and Italy. Despite what might be thought of as a limited sound palette, there is little repetition throughout the album.
‘Sun Gun’ is one of the duets, with Mendoza picking distorted lines in a heavy blues style accompanied by Drake’s nonstop barrages.
Noise can feel like drowning. This is often intentional and a large part of its appeal to the sickos, but even the largest of whales comes up for air every 15 minutes — breaking the surface tension, pupils constricting toward the atmosphere, and taking a bus-sized gulp.
Is there anything that experimental noise can learn from this mammalian constraint?
Max Klebanoff is working on it. For several years, his project Death Kneel has kneaded noise music into a wide range of shapes, from diving directly into the harsh void on 2023’s Dawn Simulation, released via très fashion noise imprint Chondritic Sound, to the cavernous, waterlogged ambiance of 2025’s Ink Wash Apparition. On his new release Remembering Well, he picks up…
“He has an energy to him like he’s floating,” Fratti said about Orcutt when she chucked his self-titled 2017 album, his first solo electric studio jaunt, on her Baker’s Dozen list for the Quietus. She’d stumbled over the record via a blog and immediately set about following the breadcrumb trail, picking through his blues deconstructions, free jazz side-quests and his early, formative work with Adris Hoyos as Harry Pussy, one of the USA’s greatest noise duos. What happened next isn’t completely clear, but Fratti and Orcutt began communicating and, at some point, Orcutt shuttled over a pack of improvised guitar solos that lit the touch paper for the next stage. At home in Mexico City, Fratti (alongside her partner and Titanic cohort I. La Católica) retreated…
On Su Shaw’s self-titled debut as SHHE, the sea seemed to flood into her songwriting unbidden, imagined as it was by the water at her home in Dundee. When Shaw moved on to the ambient suite of DÝRA, set around the fjords in Iceland, she welcomed the water in.
At the same time, Shaw picked up a somewhat nomadic existence as an artist, moving from place to place, capturing field recordings and establishing environmental installations that flowed with the very currents and tides of the water itself, finally ending up in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, where THALASSA took shape.
Its six movements chart an ambient seascape that is heightened and alarmed. Processed voices mimic breathless gasps and sharp intakes,…
The collaborative projects of Austrian experimental double bass player, guitarist, and sound artist Werner Dafeldecker (of Polwechsel) and Australian sound artist, composer, head of the Room40 label Lawrence English, have consistently concerned themselves with processes of transformation. Their new sound work, Fathom Tides, is made of English’s field recordings collected from diverse coastal environments, with some preparations, later treated extensively by Dafeldecker, who added subtle layers of electronics.
Fathom Tides is an LP of incremental change. Best heard as a single, slowly-developing piece, the album reflects the pace of nature over that of humanity. The earth is in no hurry; the trees are not multi-tasking; the streams do have…
Paradise Metal is a sleight of hand. The music within has very little to do with metal in the conventional sense, and everything to do with the genre’s outer limits-the kind of undulating drone movements practiced by Earth and SUNN O))). The folks at Heat Crimes and their partner label Elhellel will have you know that this music is created by one Father Dionysios Tabakis, an Orthodox priest who serves at the Church of the Panagitsa in Nafplio, Greece. His instruments include the ney, oud, and lyra, among others. The idea is that Paradise Metal is a kind of ancient trance music that addresses age-old maladies: depression, alienation, and isolation.
Opener “Relaxation Music with Tanbur” recalls choice moments from…
Towards an Expanse moves through its soundscape of Xhosa traditions and digital adventuring with the same attention to detail throughout. “Layer After Layer,” the opening salvo from Dumama’s prismatic debut album, mirrors its namesake in its expertly layered mille-feuille of hand drums, organ drone, and synth flashes — a considered, holistic process that endures across the electro-acoustic album’s 11 intricate songs.
On the first track, this creates a rich backdrop against which Dumama’s Morcheeba-esque downtempo serenade can drape itself. From then on, Towards an Expanse unfolds as a loving union between music and storytelling, mixing English lyrics with whispers and Xhosa chants.
Indeed, instruments are everywhere on…
In Perdido Street Station, China Miéville describes “crisis energy”, the moment when a system pushed to its absolute limit transforms, where collapse and maximum release become the same event. Guttersnipe adopt this idea as their guiding principle. On Extinction Burst!, their first record in eight years, they turn crisis energy from concept into visceral reality.
The Leeds duo (Uroceras Gigas and Tipula Confusa) see the supposed split between the cerebral and the visceral as a cultural fabrication. They reject the idea that intellect and bodily experience must be separate, a myth sustained by a society that wants its thinkers detached and its bodies unthinking. As Confusa notes, most lifeforms – bacteria, invertebrates, marine animals…