What forms can pleasure take? Is it exclusively the province of serenity and happy thoughts? Or is it possible that political confrontation and discomfort are even more powerful venues for deriving pleasure? If there is anything that unites the music on our list of the best experimental records of 2016, it is the idea that aesthetic beauty and fun can come from unlikely places and from strange sources, be it the archival sounds of protests or the pitter patter of a washing machine. Perhaps the impetus of experimental music is to challenge, but spend some time with these records, and you’ll discover not just radically different ways of finding joy in the world, you’ll also be dumbstruck with the creative methods artists use to get to that sweet spot.
AS EP
The music the Berlin duo Amnesia Scanner makes doesn't seem to exist in any knowable zone of time or space. It might be dance music, but it also just be might be a new way of writing a science fiction horror story. The sounds they utilize can feel both primeval and dystopian: existing somewhere between Lotic’s free-flowing club music and Holly Herndon’s postmodern experiments. Their debut release, a short EP of six tracks, is a riotous collection of experimental electronic music. The songs here are all small Frankenstein's monsters of sound art, stitched together with unlikely samples, biological bits and parts, terrifying voices, and gurgling noise. And against your expectations, what these two have created will make you move.
Entrañas
The 14 sections of Arca’s unclassifiable release Entrañas exist as a single 25-minute block of jagged, queasy, and unexpected electronic sound. You’d be hard pressed to know when one section begins or ends, or discern the moments when collaborators Mica Levi, Total Freedom, and Massacooramann enter the scene. It is a rigorous piece of music that bears many of the fluid and rippling hallmarks of Arca’s compositional style, but with a voice even more abject, harsh, and slippery. Here, he takes a turn for the truly nightmarish and gothic, sampling everything from the Cocteau Twins to a Charlotte Gainsbourg monologue. Entrañas in Spanish means “bowels” or “entrails,” a winking nod to Ghersi’s continual project of shattering and transforming the normative sense of disgust into a new kind of pleasure.
Arca: Entrañas (via SoundCloud)
In Summer
Romance isn’t what first comes to mind when you think of noise music. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is here to change that. He has described his new five-track cassette release, In Summer, as a “catalogue of photographs,” a strange description for drone. His sweltering and harsh compositions are supposed to be like little snapshots that evoke reminiscence and longing. The listening experience he provides with In Summer often feels extremely tactile and the mood is lush and humid and dreamy. And he does something that seems so unlikely with tape loops and crunching noises, he writes amazing love songs that just happen to make your ears ring.
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: “Love's Refrain” (via SoundCloud)
Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City
Over just two albums, Elysia Crampton has offered a body of work that burrows deeply into American history, sexuality, and community. With Demon City she has invited a host of collaborators to write what she calls an “epic poem” that looks at 18th century revolutionary Bartolina Sisa and “transformative justice” through music. She has fine-tuned her abilities as a supremely talented electronic collagist: mixing the sonic vernaculars of huayño and cumbia into a dizzying electronic geography that samples the sounds found in clubs around the world. With this album, Crampton cements her place as one of the foremost minds in electronic music, and in the years to come we’ll still be figuring out what messages she left behind.
Elysia Crampton / Rabit: "The Demon City" (via SoundCloud)
$uccessor (ded004)
Just a few years ago Fred Warmsley was a Soundcloud producer who worked under the name Lee Bannon. He collaborated with Joey Bad$$ and the Alchemist, making nostalgic hip-hop beats. Then he abandoned all that to make jungle and drum‘n’bass. Now he’s abandoned the name Lee Bannon all together, and along with it the easy logic of dance music to make eerie ambient pieces. His debut full length as Dedekind Cut, *$ucessor, *illustrates the circuitous journey Warmsley took to figure out what he might be best at doing: making soundscapes of tape hiss, pained voices, and pointillist synths that are strikingly urgent. His new brand of ambient is in no way music for airports. It doesn’t exist in the background to activate comfortable thinking, but rather combats anxiety by tackling it with tempestuous noise.
Dedekind Cut: “ℐntegra” (via SoundCloud)
The Ship
Ostensibly, Brian Eno’s The Ship is about the Titanic. In this suite of 48 minutes of palatial ambient, including a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Set Free,” Eno attempts to tell the tale of “the apex of human technical power” thwarted by the random force of nature. Unlike, say, James Cameron, another great bard of this historical disaster, Eno has no desire to dwell in drama, but is more interested in the creation of startling sensations. At points you might feel like you’re floating in the middle of the ocean, or washing up on shore, or in the middle of a maelstrom.
Ez Minzoku
Takahide Higuchi started making footwork because he thought the feeling it generated was something akin to punk or dub, the creation of its blistering beats was “about an expression, a way of approaching sound that transcends multiple genres.” The special form of footwork he makes transforms the quick pace of the genre into something that mimics the frenetic action of a human body. He deploys belching horns, bright drums, and distended samples that seem to come straight from the churning stomach of a massive whale.
Foodman: “Mid Summer Night feat. Diskomargaux” (Buy on Bandcamp)
Schaum
On the back cover of Schaum, Jan Jelinek writes that his collaboration with the Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita is in some part informed by an obsession with “the tropics.” This obsession, he continues, is centered around a “specific quality of landscape” that is defined by a “deliriously extravagant unstructuredness.” The tropics to these two might be best be understood as an undefinable thicket shrouded in mist, which is an accurate way to describe how they wend together their specialties of lulling loops and vibraphone exploration. There is a powerfully organic quality to Schaum: the sounds here are wet, diffuse, and filled with samples of chirps and quacks. In effect, it is transportive, and the album becomes a small experiential filter, suddenly changing the space you inhabit into the riverbed of a sumptuous rainforest.
Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek: “Botuto” (via SoundCloud)
Love Streams
If artists who experiment with the modalities of noise are sculptors—chiseling sine waves to do their bidding—then Tim Hecker is a land artist, bending his surroundings into massive pieces of art. Love Streams**, the latest in his fruitful career, finds Hecker working with Jóhann Jóhannsson and an Icelandic chorus to make some of his most textured musical pieces. The songs on Love Streams reimagine the sensorial possibilities of things as basic as voice and noise. His work makes these normalities feel like natural wonders well worthy of inspiring reverie.
Tim Hecker: “Castrati Stack” [Preview] (via SoundCloud)
For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)
There is a moment during some club nights, where dry ice fog drapes every corner, the bodies that surround you seem like apparitions, and time moves slower. Brian Leeds (aka Huerco S.) has logged enough hours in clubs around the world to watch this ghostly moment slowly take hold over a crowd. He abandons the strictures of techno and house music’s grid in For Those of You Who Have Never (and Also Those Who Have)**, for a form of ambient music that can help imagine what it must be like to have a seance on the dancefloor. Huerco’s ambient work is spectral, haunted, and shimmering with moments of romantic bliss. There is no hard beat, percussion, or sense of total rhythm, here, and rather his music exists like a gust of warm wind or a plume of smoke—seemingly ever present and wonderfully ephemeral.
Huerco S: “Promises of Fertility” (via SoundCloud)
Blood Bitch
More than an album of music, Blood Bitch is what Jenny Hval calls an “investigation of blood,” a celebration and analysis of menstruation, “a poetic diary of modern transience and transcendence,” a cornucopia of sly philosophical musing, and a funhouse romp through a vampire story. She is one of the smartest and funniest musicians currently working, and Blood Bitch is a testament to Hval’s skill as a storyteller and thinker. Her stories are accompanied by breathtaking, atmospheric sound that extract the grandeur of Norwegian black metal, liturgical, and ambient music. Here she reinforces her genius yet again, showing that blood is what we all share and what we should worship.
Jenny Hval: “Conceptual Romance” (via SoundCloud)
Ultimate Care II
At the release party for Ultimate Care II**, M.C. Schmidt warned the crowd, "this is genuinely an experiment. It’s experimental fucking music, so we’re going to play a washing machine.” For almost an hour, they did just that, by processing its sloshing sounds through arrays of microphones and samplers, and literally drumming all over the machine’s metal body. Ultimate Care II documents their experiments with their washing machine, and the album extracts a special discombobulating joy from the banal domestic object. It shows that the elder statesmen of experimental music are not done thinking outside of the box.
Matmos: "Ultimate Care II Excerpt Eight" (via SoundCloud)
Varmints
The classically trained composer Anna Meredith dove into the world of electronic production and slightly unhinged dance music because she “wanted more volume” than concert halls could provide. Her 2012 debut single “Nautilus,” is a swaggering, imperial march, where instruments chase each other towards a endpoint of chaotic action. Four years later, that single opens her debut LP, Varmints**, a set of 11 tracks that move with the same demonically possessed pace. Her music is entropic; these compositions are always on the brink of tearing themselves apart. Across these songs Meredith displays a knack for making inimitable compositions of immense scope and eccentric grace.
Anna Meredith: "Taken" (via SoundCloud)
On Behalf of Nature
Meredith Monk has said that philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss’ concept of “bricolage,” the way cross-cultural myths use the same materials and tools of narrative to create new forms, was one way to model her practice. On her performance piece, On Behalf of Nature, she weaves through 19 grandly wrought exercises of glossolalia, her ensemble of singers and instrumentalists maneuver the human voice through all of nature’s sounds: infantile coos, bird calls, screams, laughs, hymns, and chants. The goal was to speak on behalf of nature, and she does so with panache, celebrating the lexicon of sounds our mortal vocal box can offer and mimic.
Fetish Bones
Camae Ayewa is a Philadelphia activist, organizer, and a seasoned veteran of one of America’s most fertile and diverse music scenes. Her most recent album as Moor Mother, Fetish Bones**, is a focused, dense, and harrowing journey through the history of government mandated racism, housing discrimination, mass incarceration, and all manner of sickening facts that came from centuries of mistreatment folks of color have suffered in this country. Using archival sound, dissonant noise, and insanely intelligent poetry, Ayewa has offered something that throttles a listener with the weight of trauma and the love that can eke out of years of hardship.
Moor Mother: “Deadbeat Protest” (via Bandcamp)
Zelalem
The producer Mikael Seifu hails from the Ethiopian capital city Addis Ababa. After a period of study in the States and an exposure to the tropes of Western electronic music, he returned to Ethiopia with a newfound appreciation for the sounds that eked out of drinking halls and the azmaris musicians on the city streets. He is part of the “Ethiopiyawi Electronic” scene, and Zelalem is his love letter to the homegrown genre that’s emerged in his city. He combines electric pulses and wonky synthesizer work with indigenous instruments like the krar and masinko. On top of all this he gives a beautiful local color to his music through the use of field recordings from cafes and public spaces around Addis Ababa.
Mikael Seifu: “How To Save A Life (Vector Of Eternity)” (via SoundCloud)
blisters EP
Josiah Wise’s debut EP, blisters**, pairs his devastating, multivalent voice with the baroque soundscapes of co-producer Haxan Cloak. blisters in some respects is an incredibly chaotic record: a mercurial environment where ancient medieval sounds borrowed from harps, organs, and armadas of string instruments collide into luxuriant electronics. Yet it’s empathetic, emotionally complicated, and controlled by the exquisite power of Wise’s singing voice, which can evoke all the travails that can seem to exist in a single lifetime.
serpentwithfeet: "blisters" (via SoundCloud)
EARS
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is a disciple at the altar of the Buchla Music Easel, a rare synthesizer that looks like an overgrown piece of alien flora. Smith has extracted an extraterrestrial magic from this bizarre object, and EARS**, her latest dispatch from the Buchla’s musical universe is a terrarium of hypnotic sounds that meld together influences ranging from ’70s new age, Laurie Spiegel, and Terry Riley. She adds her relaxing voice to a chorus of beautiful sounds and an army of woodwinds provided by Bitchin Bajas member Rob Frye, make for a transcendental experience.
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: "Existence in the Unfurling" (via SoundCloud)
Sunergy
In the coastal town of Bolinas, California, Suzanne Ciani met Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith at a dinner party, and both musicians are grand masters of the arcane arts of Don Buchla’s synthesizers. After their chance meeting, Ciani invited Smith to be her studio assistant, and their collaborative effort for RVNG Intl., Sunergy is akin to a blissful Matisse-esque landscape painting that crystallizes the Pacific cliffside view from Ciani’s home. Over three pieces, their dialogue is glittering and oceanic: a beautiful tapestry of white noise, drone, and electric magic.
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith/Suzanne Ciani : “Closed Circuit” (via SoundCloud)
Serpent Music
Rahel Ali started composing Serpent Music after a stint in Leipzig, looking for an outlet to write about “relationships and stuff.” The album is Ali’s interpretation of soul music, as informed by Throbbing Gristle as Otis Redding. He utilizes a sleepy falsetto, opiated guitars, jagged percussion, and a variety of field recordings that range from solemn choruses to the sound of lapping water. Serpent Music is an astoundingly sensitive portrait of Ali’s emotional range as a producer who can generate a kaleidoscope of moods at will.
Yves Tumor: “Role in Creation” (via SoundCloud)
