Experimental / Avant-Garde

I first met La Monte Young at a 1981 performance of his piece The Well-Tuned Piano at the Dia Art Foundation’s beautiful Harrison Street space. When I got a chance after the show to speak with La Monte and his wife, Light artist Marian Zazeela, I was surprised at their friendly demeanor and sense of humor. We began working together shortly after that. Since then, I have been playing music in Harmonic Series tuning. When Brian [Chase of Chaikin Records] first spoke to me about the possibility of …

Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, The Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning this year with the firs…

*Edition of 100* K/S/R (Ben Kujawski, Abigail Smith & Justin Rhody) have been performing and recording together since 2022. Recorded by the band themselves during a full week of day-long sessions - violin, percussion, lap steel, accordion, flute, guitar, harmonica, and rhodes piano were each stretched, damaged & made to sing through various extended techniques. The trio's non-concentric approach to collective improvisation mirrors the dark harmonic density and symbiotic formal structures of the …

"Historically, ensembles combining taishōgoto and bagpipes (at least inside the milieu of “jazz”) have been on the tame side. The Winkler Twins, Dagnabbit, CUZ and other such units pandered to the bowtie set so exclusively that many people have all but dismissed the instruments as hopelessly moldy or even (in the words of critic Milo Fine) “tools of fascism and complacency.” That said, it is my pleasure to announce that the duo of William “Bill” Nace and Dave “David” Watson has made a mighty eff…

Giuni Russo's 1981 CGD album, produced with Franco Battiato and Alberto Radius and arranged by Battiato and Giusto Pio: electronics, experimental pop and avant-garde singing, remastered on 180g yellow vinyl.

The 2005 album of the Montreal ensemble, back for its 21st anniversary: six songs of protest and love for strings, guitars, piano and group voices, recorded at Hotel2Tango with Howard Bilerman.

Saxophone and laptop: the first record of Chris Pitsiokos’s project on four-channel audio, rhythms from irrational numbers and shifting polarity. Each copy with original artwork.

A one-man studio album: Chris Pitsiokos on saxophones, harmonica, bass, electronic drums, voice and electronics, with Rick Eye and Jason Nazary on some tracks.

Dramatic moments of enlightenment – when the mask is dropped and truth revealed – are found in tales from the Buddha and Euripides to Scooby Doo and Star Wars. And few artists have been as fascinated by niggling the clueless or deflating the stuck-up as Harry Partch (1901-1974). As a lifelong outsider, the conformist society he experienced and the narrow-minded attitudes (not to mention musical delusions) that permeated it, are themes to which he often returned. In the 1950s, seeing a world that…

Two decades of French experimentalism meets Japanese spiritual practice in this haunting collaboration. Recorded around a 104-year-old harmonium, Dora and Suzuki channel otherworldly beauty through voice and electronics - music of prayer, magic, and genuine mystery.

** Remastered from the Original Tapes. Deluxe Edition Reissue Sanctioned by John Cale Himself. Includes Previously Unreleased Outtakes & a Brand-New Recording** John Cale was never very kind to his solo debut, Vintage Violence. When it was released in early 1970, Cale had been out of The Velvet Underground for less than two years. He wanted to prove he could be the songwriter, the person penning the words and melodies behind which a band could work. “I was masked on Vintage Violence,” he wrote m…

All seven Paragraphs of Cardew's The Great Learning by the Scratch Orchestra Strasbourg under Didier Aschour, an orchestra born from an open call and two years of shared practice: 4CD box with a 116-page booklet.

Alvin Curran conducts the Iato Orchestra, thirty musicians with voice, reeds, brass, strings, harp, accordion, guitars, vibraphone, basses, two drummers and four electronics players.

Rick Potts is a founding LAFMS member, active in experimental music since the early 70's, and enormously influential on five decades worth of musical practitioners with a penchant for outer/freakdom sounds. Don't Think is a 2CD compilation of rare and unreleased recordings, spanning 37 tracks and 2.5 hours, and covering the entire range of Potts' musical output - from song-based new wave/art rock to more abstract loop-based noise (note the lowercase 'n') and mutant disco (disco of the Dennis Duc…

As one of the people who defined punk's protest art in the 1970s and 1980s, Gee Vaucher (b. 1945) deserves to be much better-known. She produced confrontational album covers for the legendary anarchist band Crass and later went on to do the same for Northern indie legends the Charlatans, among others. As well as offering an overview of Vaucher’s career,  the book also offers a whistle-stop tour through later 20th century counterculture. We hear about the Fluxus movement; COUM Transmissions (the …

The “Sympathetic Resonance” LP by Momen is released on Unheard Of Hope and marks the debut of the London-based duo. Momen consists of Iván Muela (piano, guitar, electronics) and Nat Philipps (saxophone, electronics); in eight movements they explore a field of tension between restraint and catharsis. Sonic reference points range from Bach and Ryuichi Sakamoto to experiences in post-punk bands, giving the pieces an unusual blend of classical melodic lines, jazzy improvisation, and electronically s…

The identity of Deep Drive comes in large part from the way Peter Zummo moves through the world. Using his smartphone, he records daily fragments: of daydreams and conversations, signage and slogans, moments that that strike him as insightful, odd, amusing, thereby creating a sonic collage of rhythms, melodies and voices. His deep baritone is imbued with laconic humour, and Deep Drive"s track titles riff off his messaging. "Prepare For Docking" refers to the Staten Island ferry and the spectacle…

Huge Tip! In the Merry Month of May is the final studio recording of the late, great Tony Conrad, and the first duo release with Jennifer Walshe, one of Conrad’s most important collaborators in the final decade of his life. Befitting these two absurdly gifted hell-raisers, this is a wild, improvisatory flaying of song, with Walshe’s clarion voice at the heart of the enterprise. The sheer sonic force of opener “In the Merry Month of May” recalls the ecstatic charge of Conrad’s Slapping Pythagoras…

What might appear to be the most unlikely collaboration of 2024 proves also to be one of the most invigorating listens of the year! Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance are in full aural/metaphysical alignment in their mutual effort to become Jinxed by Being. On first listen, it becomes immediately clear that this fusion of Shackleton's bass-heavy cosmic dread and Six Organs' ritual folksong makes total sense. Longtime listeners know that both Shackleton and Six Organs of Admittance have been u…

Tip! Early acoustic guitar improv performances from the Bhutanese expat, who’d come to Asheville, NC to study in 2000 and discovered worlds of anarcho-punk and avant garde such as he’d only dreamed. Having made recordings of his newly-located improvisational conception, he intuited a desire to go deeper in his explorations of the recorded sound of the guitar, melding and colliding traditional music with his feeling for the range of textures within.

Master of myriad styles, Sir Rick Bishop takes in baroque, flamenco, surf, and harder to place fusions of phantasmagoric sound design, Gaelic folk and Indian Raga, and more lysergic expression in this bounty of a new album. Five years after Tangier Sessions, Sir Richard Bishop, we presume, is back from his travels around the world. With Oneiric Formulary, he’s dug deeper into his bag of extra-musical gestures from the eternal and unknowable, along with a few sounds we might recognize, all transm…

Face-shredding, spine-melting - these are all just clichés next to the jams found within this humble packaging. Jim O'Rourke, Darin Gray and Chris Corsano may not even exist anymore, judging from the cataclysms to be heard here.

* Limited Edition 180-Gram white vinyl. Comes in a deluxe matte laminate gatefold sleeve * Newly mastered from original BYG tapes. BYG were a pioneering independant record compagny, one of the  first labels to actively promote diversity and support black African-American musicians and multi-cultural artists worldwide during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Launched in the late ’60s in Paris, a city then in the throes of great social upheaval, BYG became the home of music that was uncompromisingly new. The…

On Nouvelles Ethnologiques de l’Obscur Museum, NEO Museum forge a fierce, finely cut collision of free jazz, radical rock and European avant-garde composition. Born in mid-80s Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, the trio turns saxophone, guitar and drums into a compact laboratory of fractured forms, bristling improvisation and volatile collective invention.

*300 copies limited edition* "After Klanggalerie coaxed a sleeping dog out of the hut with "Extra Weapons / Double Dog Dare, Summer '84" by The Lo Yo Yo, ADN throws me the next sweet bone with the re-release of Look de Bouk's avec des coussins bleus (AD9 012, LP). Look De Bouk were even split partners with Alig Pearce, Mick Hobbs, Joey Stack & Caroline Brooks on AYAA's "Double Dog Dare" cassette and were also linked together again on the "Bad Alchemy Nr 17" live @ AKW compilation. Here slinging …

Third album by Glass Triangle, Zeena Parkins on electric harp, Mette Rasmussen on alto saxophone and voice and Ryan Sawyer on drums: a studio session moving from delicate passages to dense, kinetic interplay.

Weston Olencki's compositions for the Quebec percussion trio Bascaille: tuned fiddles, homemade zithers, watershed debris, speaker cones and an upright piano in two long pieces of friction, resonance and lopsided pulse.

Four CDs from Jon Rose's Rosenberg Museum, the decades-long project around the violin: homemade and hacked string instruments, true and invented violin stories, and 37 tracks from the museum now housed in central Australia.

Originally released in 1980 and long regarded as one of the most avant‑garde statements of its era, Hansten Klork captures Metabolist at the intersection of post‑punk restlessness and uncompromising experimentalism. The album’s stark textures, motoric rhythms, and hypnotic minimalism reveal a band equally indebted to kraut‑rock repetition, post‑industrial atmospheres, and the austere clarity of minimalism—creating a distinct, unsettling sound that still sounds contemporary today. This reissue re…

You can recall John Lurie from his amazing performances in Jim Jarmusch ‘Permanente Vacation’ or ‘Stranger Than Paradise’ (even his cameo in Paris, Texas and Desperately Seeking Susan), but the long & tall man from Minneapolis is essentially an outstanding musician. From 1979 onwards he was the leader of The Lounge Lizards, a band he put together in downtown New York with the help of brother Evan (piano, organ), Arto Lindsay (on guitar), Steve Piccolo (on bass) and Anton Fier on drums. Their mus…

Tyondai Braxton’s Splayed Werks (his first full-length since the 2022 Telekinesis sessions) opens a new chapter: over 70 minutes of electronics and detailed sound design spread across 15 tracks, most under five minutes, favoring shorter forms over his previous long-format work. The album merges recent compositions with pieces written across the last decade—reworked, remastered by Matt Colton, and sequenced into a single continuous statement that reads less like a compilation and more like a real…

2026 Stock 700 copies in black vinyl. The enigmatic sound architects of Nurse With Wound return with Backside, a haunting new studio album that bridges four decades of underground sonic archaeology. Released through Rotorelief in an exquisite limited edition pressing, this latest opus represents Steven Stapleton and Andrew Liles at their most revelatory, breathing new life into fragments of the long-lost Bladder Flask sessions from circa 1980. The paths of Nurse With Wound and Richard Rupenus's…

Neuma presents Drumming in the Dark by Steven Schick. Engineer, Josef Kucera. Production assistance: Roger Reynolds and Terry Longshore. "In 1938 when John Cage formulated his famous dictum, "Percussion is revolution," I doubt that he had my mother in mind..." - Steven Schick

Miya Masaoka's orchestra, recorded live in San Francisco in 1995 and 1997 with George Lewis, Vijay Iyer, Trevor Dunn and others: strings, Asian winds, shamisen, electronics and turntables under her whole-body conduction.

Zeena Parkins' 1992 album recorded in New York: electric harp, keyboards and tape with Ikue Mori on drums, Chris Cochrane on guitar, David Shea, and her sisters Margaret and Sara on cello, violin and voice.

UK multi-reed master Evan Parker brings an all-star electroacoustic septet to the 2014 Victoriaville Festival for the massive and wonderfully detailed two part composition "Seven", performed with Peter Evans, Okkyung Lee, George Lewis, Ikue Mori, Sam Pluta, and Ned Rothenberg.

Elliott Sharp writing for strings: Orchestra Carbon's violins, viola, cellos and double bass with electronic percussion, recorded in New York in 1992. Dense, restless pieces between contemporary chamber music and noise.

On In Filth Your Mystery Is Kingdom / Far Smile Peasant in Yellow Music, Dagmar Zuniga threads five years of Tascam‑4‑track recordings into a porous, tape‑hazed songbook: fragile transmissions where harmony, hiss and fingertip detail make lo‑fi feel widescreen.

Nico's second solo album, 1968's 'The Marble Index', has long been out of print. This reissue includes audio mastered from the original tapes and previously unreleased photos of Nico by Guy Webster. Nico's haunting vocals predicted the Gothic movement and co-producer and Velvet Underground's band mate John Cale's startingly modern classical production ensured 'The Marble Index's timeless appeal. The iconic music journalist Lester Bangs wrote, “The Marble Index is the greatest piece of 'avant-gar…

The second part of Matador’s reissues of the essential early records by Texas’s Butthole Surfers continues with three of their most insane slabs -- 1985’s ‘Cream Corn from the Socket of Davis,’ 1987’s ‘Locust Abortion Technician’ and 1988’s ‘Hairway to Steven.’ The period during which these records were first issued parallels the Buttholes’ transition from being weirdo Texas outcasts to becoming internationally recognized smut-kings of the American underground. In 1985 they were still the sole p…