This year has been particularly exciting for experimental music, ranging from free-form guitar freak-outs to lush, ambient, always pushing boundaries.
Laura Ann Singh steers her reckless way through traditional jazz, torch song elegance, avant-garde experiments, and an anarchic sense of punk rebellion.
David Garland’s The Spark may be an expression of loss, but it also overflows with kindness, positivity, and the endless curiosity of a truly original artist.
Everything Is Now expertly demonstrates how NYC’s varied avant-garde subcultures were birthed in cold-water lofts, coffeehouses, and tiny storefront galleries and theaters.
Lingyuan Yang has crafted a brooding, often tumultuous beast that takes the best aspects of freeform jazz and turns it into something unique and beautiful.
Tim Berne’s Yikes Too is three imaginative jazz musicians in a sandbox, building and molding, occasionally smashing a bit, but most typically creating magic.
Self-described as “an experiment in percussive languages”, the latest project from avant-garde Mexican duo Pidgins is uplifting and immersive.
Circuit des Yeux’s work, including her singular voice, conjures the grand epics, the metamorphoses that the ancients whispered and sang about.
Experimental duo Sarah Belle Reid and Vinny Golia use improvisation playfully and imaginatively with a unique new release that’s something truly magical.
Death Sneeze’s debut album is noisy, multifaceted, boundless, and cacophonous but contains a million unique moments ripe for discovery.
The best experimental albums highlight the breadth of human expression and take listeners to heretofore unknown realms in music, pushing boundaries.
Arthur Russell biography Travels Over Feeling is an elegy for a generation of underground artists that died too soon and a requiem for a vanished New York.
