Experimental / All styles

Each composition on Padesip, the debut project from Brussels-based electronic artist Gijs Milius, splices together disparate ways of seeing and hearing. Though most of the songs are between 2 and 3 minutes long, they feel rich, embodied, and surprising, full of left turns and tiny moments of tension that you want to comb through the composition to hear again. Listening to these curious and tactile compositions feels a bit like using a viewfinder toy to flip between images of lakes, canyons, and …

*200 copies limited edition* For more than three decades, Germany’s drone ambient pioneers Troum have explored the liminal zones between sound and sensation, shaping immersive sonic environments that dissolve boundaries between ritual, memory, and matter. Emerging from the industrial-ambient underground of the 1990s, Troum have remained devoted to a singular artistic intent: to create transformative listening experiences, dense with atmosphere and charged with inner movement, where sound becomes…

*200 copies limited edition* Rootless is Andy Guthrie’s fourth album for Students of Decay, following 2022’s Gyropedie. Created in part during a 2024 residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts, it finds the San Francisco-based multi-instrumentalist expanding the hermetic electroacoustic language of their earlier work into something even more open-ended and oneiric. Field recordings mingle with French horn, piano, electronics and, increasingly, the human voice, forming environments whose fami…

Guitar solos by Shin'ichi Isohata and six duets with Otomo Yoshihide, electric and acoustic, 24 tracks recorded in Osaka in early 2013. Jigen Production.

Guatemalan cellist and singer Mabe Fratti meets guitarist Bill Orcutt: songs built from Orcutt's solo guitar sketches, cello and voice, recorded between Mexico City and San Francisco. CD edition on Unheard of Hope.

Split release on Minotauro: Thomas Hand Chaste's Insetti, where progressive rock atmospheres meet dark minimal ambient and dirty industrial sounds, paired with Felis Catus's Cartesius. Seventeen tracks in all.

Bogotá based Tropical futurists Rizomagic unveil their interplanetary mission to combine futurist technology with cosmic patterns, traditional rhythms and the woozy manipulations of pitched-down Cumbia Rebajada. Rizomagic are Edgar Marún and Diego Manrique, who met in 2020 while studying double bass and composition (respectively) at university in their hometown of Bogota. After finding a shared musical taste, they started producing music together during the first lockdown, swiftly producing and …

Liz Harris, aka Grouper, collects two scores for short films about water by Tanja Engelberts and Takashi Makino: two long pieces of Mellotron, tape loops, Wurlitzer and field recordings. On Kranky.

The Return of Sai Yoshiko! At first glance, the partnership between Jojo Hiroshige and Yoshiko Sai seems implausible. After all, what could the King of Noise and the mystical folk singer have in common? Released in 2001, and marking the first musical work from Sai in over two decades, Crimson Voyage is dark swirling ambience, a spirited improvisation between a master of dark noise, and one of Japan’s most underrated singers. Sai’s voice, still as exhilarating as it was during Mangekyo, bursts fo…

There's a moment, early in Two Lonely Space Pilots, when time seems to stop. Not pause - stop. The saxophone sustains a note that hovers somewhere between breath and pure tone, while scattered percussion marks territory in the emptiness like footprints on an unexplored planet. This isn't background music. This is Hekura - a Barcelona-based duo who've spent years learning how to make silence speak and stillness move. Ernest Pipó and Edu Pons met during their jazz studies at Taller de Músics in Ba…

I started to think about the verb 'superimpose' and the implications this verb has in moments of intense work in dialogue with another and how ideas overlap. I also think about that moment when you feel you don't know anything and you are soft like jello and any fork can go through you. And ideas change and grow on that soft spot where there's a question mark. Feeling like you don't know makes you softFeeling like you don't know makes you confusedMaybe feeling like you don't know will transform …

Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay's Humboldt County duo returns to Discrepant with seven ritual pieces of voices, violins, flutes, synths, drums, bells and field recordings: end-time visions for the unquiet spirit.

The Swiss trio's new double LP turns from brutal, linear minimalism to slowness and immersion: four long pieces of guitar, bass and drums recorded almost entirely live, with a drum machine for the first time. On Cuneiform.

Blck vinyl. Current 93's first and last album, Nature Unveiled dragged together my obsessions, as I had decided to make a pop album that dealt with my primary fascinations: Christian apocalyptic and eschatological Christian texts. In my speed-ridden soul and mind, I thought I was reinventing The Ronettes, and that the two long sides of Nature Unveiled were A- and B-sides of a wall of soundhogs HIT! But the reality is that I was sharing a squat in Vauxhall with little annie anxiety, and hanging o…

Black vinyl. Reeling in the weeks -- which felt like years -- after my first Current 93 album, I had started on the difficult second C93 album, Dogs Blood Rising. Having been asked to appear on both Top Of The Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test 93 times in the same week after the release of Nature Unveiled, I realized that God was telling me that I had hit on a winning formula of Christian eschatology and Apocalyptic Christian texts over a Soundscape as cool as flies, but that I was missing the …

One of the wildest albums that British reedman Lol Coxhill ever played on – and that's really saying a lot, as he's played on a heck of a lot of wild albums! The set's done with a Japanese group, and it's got an insane mix of improvised jazz and post-punk energy – Lol's work on soprano sax mixing with guitar, drums, and percussion – often used in different combinations from track to track – sometimes very free, sometimes with more of a song structure, and vocals from singer Eiichi Tsutaki in Jap…

The producer of Sunn O))) and co-composer of the Mandy score makes his own 'science fiction music' from a Philip K. Dick lecture, with Jim Jarmusch, Cyro Baptista and Charmaine Lee.

Tokyo tap dancer and metal percussionist Reona on a wooden platform with bells, bowls, chains, signboards and a loudspeaker; produced by Randall Dunn, with Atsuo of Boris on one track.

Oren Ambarchi alone with the guitar: two sides, two single takes with almost no effects, recorded to tape at Studio Dede in Tokyo and produced by Randall Dunn.

William Basinski's first new album in six years: a single 40-minute piece for solo piano and subtle electronics, inspired by a past-life regression practice and by Morton Feldman.

Experimental electronic music made entirely from processed recordings of Brazilian stingless bees, by the artist and researcher João Machado, whose bee recordings are held by the British Library.

Faith Coloccia's unadorned voice over Tashi Dorji's glacial, howling guitar, with piano, organ and tubular bells: songs about land, property and loss, recorded between Anacortes and Asheville.

Vanishing Twin's new album pieces together daily recording sessions swapped between rural France and London: a playful collage of postmodern songcraft where the trio trade instruments and roles.

Clawhammer banjo meets synthesizers, loops and pedal steel: Allison de Groot and Nashville's Rich Ruth turn a planned solo record into a shared album of cosmic, tender instrumental music.

New Zealand sound artist Rachel Shearer listens to the Earth through Māori and Western practice: field recordings, electronics and voice on her first full album, a deluxe 45 RPM gatefold from Thin Wrist.

This is based on the soundtrack of an audio video installation and basically has been constructed from field recordings of various locations around the city of Cologne. The theme is an exploration of space and acoustics with sounds of background noise mixed with new electronic sounds. It's fairly sparse and minimal and at various points I can hear the sound of my typing drowning out the record. There are certainly some interesting sounds though once things get going, particularly on side …

2007 release ** "A completely remixed/reworked version of the first Mimir album which was originally recorded between 1989/'90 and released in 1991: Edward Ka-spel, Andreas Martin, Silverman and Christoph Heemann concentrate on a variety of analog synths and Krautrock guitars: '...immediately after he caught sight of the lights marking the town, he pressed the ejection button and felt himself flung upward with a greater violence than he had expected. For a moment he was enveloped in darkness; th…

Sun Araw released Rock Sutra, via Sun Ark, his Drag City sub-label. Cameron Stallones' latest LP consists of four long tracks. "The music is offered in a spirit of generosity and adventure," he says, "It doesn't stay put, and it keeps zooming in to reveal more and more. This is so you can zoom in and experience 'feeling-without-articulating' for yourself, which is better than reading about it here." Rock Sutra is the first album Stallones recorded live-to-MIDI with his band, which consists of Jo…

**CD edition** With the wake of his blessed collab with The Congos and his 'Ancient Romans' side still shimmering in our memory, Cameron Stallones returns from his mystic regressions to present a sixth solo LP as Sun Araw. With his return comes a startlingly fresh-faced clarity to his sound, as though millenia of metaphysical sonic travel have dislodged the overbuild of dusty amp wax and really let some cosmic sunshine thru. It's perhaps also down to some assistance in the final process from Pet…

"Orton Socket is mainly comprised of main-man and mouthpiece Rob Mazurek, known for blowing horns (as well as eardrums and minds etcetera) on a variety of efforts by Stereolab, Isotope 217, his own Chicago Underground Duo, and some other folks you probably have’nt heard of. Plus Rob's done a series of records under his own name. See, he's been a spotlight kid for years now. But for 99 Explosions, Rob has reemerged incognito, armed with synthesizer and powerbook, wearing the shimmering cloak of O…

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…

The first duo performance between David Grubbs and Manuel Mota, the mysterious Portguese guitar legend; a real-time, documentary feel in which athematic, non-repeating musical gestures are rendered with an extreme sensitivity to microscopic soundworlds brought about by fingertips, strings, and tube amplifiers."Smoky seance of barely there strums and possible psychokinesis, ideal for fans of Loren Connors..." Boomkat

Dust & Mirrors’ is the second full-length album by the trio of Andrea Belfi (drums, percussion, electronics), David Grubbs (electric guitar, piano, voice), and Stefano Pilia (electric guitar). It follows 2010’s ‘Onrushing Cloud’ LP and finds the trio confidently taking stabs in a number of opposed directions. It dramatically widens the terrain in which the group operates. Between albums, the three musicians worked together on David Grubbs’s 2013 album ‘The Plain Where The Palace Stood’, and took…

David's debut on vinyl as a solo guitar improviser. Unhurried probing through spare themes for electric guitar and nylon-string acoustic. "Strange to say, but Borough of Broken Umbrellas is David Grubbs's first record of solo guitar improvisations, a profoundly unhurried probing (sometimes worrying, like a tongue and a tooth) of a handful of gorgeously spare themes. It divides its sides between two long (c. 12') tracks for electric guitar and nylon-string guitar. Comparisons are unnecessary…

*Dense drones embedded with stuttering, spitted fragments of poetry. very abstract and oblique but engaging.* "The third collaboration from poet Howe and musician Grubbs. A soundworld that germinates wildly from this most multiple and heterogenous of Howe's poems. Real-performance of the fragment-strewn text is subject to Grubbs' further deformations, scattering and layerings."Frolic Architecture is the third collaboration from poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs. It follows Souls of the …

Impro-Micro-Acoustique is a meeting across generations and genre. Composer Luc Ferrari, one of the progenitors of musique concrete and a pioneer of electroacoustic music, has previously written scores for improvising musicians. (One of these, 'Tautologos 3' -- in an explosive 1970 performance by Konstantin Simonovitch's ensemble -- appears on an earlier Blue Chopsticks release.) But prior to Impro-Micro-Acoustique, Ferrari himself had never played the role of an improviser. Several years ago, Fe…

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…

New Hexadic music from outside our native understanding of ti me and space! Features underground masters of sound Moon Duo, Richard Youngs, Meg Baird & Charlie Saufley, Tashi Dorji, Jenks Miller, Phil Legard, and Stephen O'Malley, Tim Wyskida & Marc Urselli.