If not for experimental musicians, music might never move forward. These artists challenge what is while wondering what could be. They ask if instruments might be played in a different manner, or they make their own instruments – in one instance below, using multiple parts of a horse. They stretch their voices in unusual ways, reaching for dissonant notes, looping, layering and pitch-shifting. They seek juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated timbres. Not everything will work, of course; the very nature of experimentalism is the possibility of failure, although in most cases the experiment itself is the success. The ten artists below succeed in both senses of the word, producing sonic documents of great originality. We hope you enjoy our selection of the year’s best experimental music!
Cruel Diagonals ~ Fractured Whole (Beacon Sound)
The ear may hear what it imagines is bass, an electronic beat, a synthesized drone; yet all of these sounds are produced by Megan Mitchell’s mezzo-soprano voice. Whether her voice is processed or unadorned, it contains a spiritual, even ritualistic quality that matches the theme: fractured pieces, seeking to be made whole. Connecting to ancient rituals and sacred chant, she opens a window to the divine. (Richard Allen)
Flora Yin Wong ~ Cold Reading (Modern Love)
If an experimental album can be judged a success by completely perplexing the listener, then there can be no doubt that Cold Reading has earned its place on this list. Flora Yin Wong draws on a myriad of instruments, sounds, and techniques for this disorienting journey, never lingering long enough to reveal her secrets nor try our patience. Animated by a rootless spirit, these ten ghostly tracks defy categorization, hauntingly affective and unsettling in their beauty. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Giuseppe Ielasi ~ Down on Darkened Meetings (Black Truffle)
There’s plenty of static in the wires here. Giuseppe Ielasi has picked up his electric guitar and pedals for the first time in a while (and if we’ve missed a release, we apologise). The results are full of electrical crunch and glitch while containing some of the most beautifully lyrical passages we’ve heard all year. The untitled pieces and the enigmatic cover art allow our thoughts to drift without direction from anything other than the music: this feels like a late-night album, smooth enough to let us float, prickly enough to keep us grounded. (Jeremy Bye)
Jan Matiz ~ II (tier.debut)
Acoustic guitar harmonies surrounded by a whirlwind of glitch and samples make Jan Matiz’s II a delightful blend of unpredictability and beauty. Opener “Siebenacht” sets the tone of the album by opening with a haze of gentle feedback that hails a gorgeous guitar melody in 7/8 time, before a drum machine joins and immediately starts messing with our sense of where the pulse is, which is then enhanced by the addition of a captivating mix of unexpected sounds. Through reflections on the album’s creation, influenced by solitary recording in a desolate Dutch landscape and later experiences in bustling Athens, Matiz crafts a captivating sonic journey, inviting enthusiasts of chance encounters to revel in their unexpected allure. (Garreth Brooke)
KING VISION ULTRA ~ SHOOK WORLD (PTP)
Approached by Atlanta post-punks Algiers to mine their then-forthcoming album Shook for samples, New York producer King Vision Ultra produced a wholly original work. As different as the two end results are, there is a beautiful symmetry to these projects. Algiers brought together a cohort of incredible collaborators, and King Vision Ultra does the same. Where Shook has billy woods, Big Rube, and Patrick Shiroishi, SHOOK WORLD features E L U C I D, Bigg Jus, and Matana Roberts. All the collaborators have strong connections to NYC, and the field recording of trains which help glue the 21-track album together makes the city itself a collaborator. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Matana Roberts ~ Coin Coin Chapter Five: in the Garden … (Constellation)
It’s often difficult for historians to talk about historical works beyond academic writing, memoirs, or similar texts; art history often frames artworks as objects of history, not as historiography itself, many times obfuscating how art can build distinct registers of historical discourse. Coin Coin is one such work, where the artist is writing history in a mode that escapes, transcends, and makes complex connections to the discipline – its support is archival, its explanation aesthetic, its description musical. With every new entry in the series, Roberts achieves the great task of history, to let the present shiver with ecstatic clashes of past events, to render its fractal quality of difference and repetition visible, and thus subject to be grasped and remade. (David Murrieta Flores)
Matthew Herbert ~ The Horse (Accidental Records)
Matthew Herbert’s latest album The Horse is built around a full-size horse skeleton, a concept that raises questions about intent. While Herbert isn’t shy of controversy, evident in his past works that challenged societal norms, using a horse’s remains as an instrument connects to ancient musical traditions rather than mere shock value. The album, structured chronologically, progresses from primitive sounds to more familiar realms, transitioning from tracks potentially testing patience to irresistible pieces like “The Horse Has A Voice” and “The Horse is Here,” incorporating field recordings with a captivating finish. (Garreth Brooke)
Maud the Moth + trajedesaliva ~ Bordando el manto terrestre (Time Released Sound)
This album had us at the cover, an evocative collage that gestures towards the album’s subject, the surrealist Spanish painter Remedios Varo. On Bordando el manto terrestro, pianist and singer-songwriter Maud the Moth joins musical visions with the dark-ambient artist trajedesaliva to explore the stages of growth in Varos’s life. Deploying strings, piano, synthesizers, field recordings and of course Amaya Lopez-Carromero’s voice, the album moves back and forth from undulating and elegiac to anthemic and brilliant, evoking the dream-like visions of Varos and the surrealistic style in which she worked. The sonic palette is heavy on the duo’s native instruments, voice, organ, and piano for Lopez-Carromero, an array of synthesizers for trajedesaliva’s Mon Ninguen. Together they weave a layered space full of mystery and yearning. Bordando is a fascinating, dramatic interpretation of what music inspired by the life and work of an artist can sound like. (Jennifer Smart)
Paavoharju ~ Yön mustia kukkia (Fonal)
Several bands have looked at their discography and thought, ‘We can’t end it there’. This notion has propelled them to either a final burst of creativity or, rarely, a complete renaissance as a second act. It remains to be seen what happens with Paavoharju: at the very least Yön Mustia Kukkia offers some closure for the group by finishing the trilogy that started with Yhä Hämärää and Laula Laakson Kukista over 15 years ago. But this album is so fresh and joyful while maintaining a spooky, folky, mystique that it would be a shame if this was it. Whatever happens, we have the music, and it is glorious. (Jeremy Bye)
Sabiwa ~ Island no. 16 – Memories of Future Landscapes (Phantom Limb)
One of the most exciting artists of our times returns with a unique take on soundscapes via a folk spirit of experimentation, recreating a vast tradition for a place yet-to-exist that nonetheless feels grounded, alive, charged with a dream-like history. This is perhaps the Taiwanese artist’s most surreal work to date, in the sense that it subverts totalizing expectations and sensible aesthetics, offering up a series of mnemonic codes (field recordings, electronics, fully-fleshed and chopped-up songs, Asian percussion instruments, drones) to enter a parallel dimension. In it, the fragment reigns supreme, its sleep producing monstrous marvels, redefining soundscapes as the pure fantasy of locality, one so extreme it melts any specificity into the borders of nowhere. (David Murrieta Flores)
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