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All kinds of experimental music can be found on Bandcamp: free jazz, avant-rock, dense noise, outer-limits electronics, deconstructed folk, abstract spoken word, and so much more. If an artist is trying something new with an established form or inventing a new one completely, there’s a good chance they’re doing it on Bandcamp. Each month, Marc Masters picks some of the best releases from across this wide, exploratory spectrum. October’s selection includes a soundwalk in a park in Poland, improvisations based on French book titles, music played after meals in a Massachusetts backyard, and a veteran composer combining Morton Feldman with J. Dilla.

Alma Laprida Pitch Dark and Trembling

When I last highlighted a release by Argentinian artist Alma Laprida , she was using a glass and metal instrument called the Cristal Baschet. This time around, Laprida focuses on a two-stringed European instrument called the tromba marina , improvising through an array of effects pedals. She spends much of Pitch Dark and Trembling on the lower end of the sonic spectrum, creating subterranean waves that frequently crest and retreat in disorienting patterns. On opener “A Thick Event” she creates a heavy sonic undertow, as if the music is both pulling you in spitting you out, while on “Trembling” the addition of a metallic rhythm evokes an encroaching army or perhaps a lumbering herd. It’s impressive that Laprida can consistently restrict herself to one instrument yet still generate such a wide world of intriguing sounds.

Birgé, Duret & Saada Titres

In mid-October, French musicians Jean-Jacques Birgé , Alexandre Saada , and Hélène Duret met at a studio with an audience present and improvised, asking attendees to propose themes based on book titles. The results were posted to Bandcamp the next day as Titres (French for “titles”), with seven tracks of respectful but active musical conversation. Birgé’s keyboard and electronics supply a wealth of textures, including an underwater-sounding dance beat near the beginning of “París no se acaba nunca,” while Saada and Duret add busy note clusters that lean toward jazz but aren’t constrained by genre. Saada’s piano playing is particularly expressive, finding sharp moments inside halting rhythms, while Duret’s bass clarinet keeps the trio grounded even when it sounds like it wants to fly away. Other instruments—guitar, reed trumpet, music boxes—pass in and out of the mix, but things never get overcrowded.

Body Meπa Prayer in Dub

The second album by New York quartet Body Meπa charges out of the gate. Opener “Etel” announces itself with the penetrating drum rolls of Greg Fox , soon joined by Melvin Gibbs ’s ascending bass and guitarist Sasha Frere-Jones and Grey McMurray ’s shimmering wall of guitar accents. It’s a dazzling way to start a record, and my immediate question was whether Body Meπa could maintain this momentum for six more songs. Turns out that’s no problem for this well-pedigreed collective, as the rest of Prayer in Dub rolls forward with many sounds and tempos, such as the twisty guitar chaos of “Deborah” and the Dirty Three-esque ascendance of “Scout.” There’s an airy, free-flowing quality to Prayer in Dub that suggests the spacey jams of Tortoise , but Body Meπa’s music has so many original ideas that only these four could’ve made it.

Angel Brügger First Time

North Carolina artist Angel Brügger had a busy October, posting four different releases on her Bandcamp page, as well as putting out three works by other artists on her Female Stint label. All are worth your time, but I find First Time to be the most compelling because it’s the densest and often the loudest of the bunch. For 34 minutes, Brügger piles on noise, static, drone, and overtones, moving forward urgently and drilling down intensely. It’s the kind of noise that can be an aural Rorschach test, as you might hear it completely differently than someone else, or even than the last time you listened. That’s a strength of Brügger’s music, which builds into such a thick racket that you can imagine Brügger making First Time layer by layer until entire worlds get buried beneath its growling surface.

Ernst Karel & Bhob Rainey 47 Gates

If you’re familiar with the exceptional work of sound artists Ernst Karel and Bhob Rainey , you won’t be surprised to find that this collaboration is exceptional too. You might not even be surprised by how it sounds: Their distinct way of using field recordings, electronics, and acoustic instruments comes through clearly on the four pieces on 47 Gates . (Though I didn’t predict the static-y, AM radio-sounding pop sample halfway through “Sparks an empty pool.”) But surprise is secondary to the compelling fields of sound. I’m most partial to the closer, the 20-minute “Atmospheric rivers,” which does often actually sound like rivers, but also morphs into echoes, abstract tones, and bold cacophony. While guests like violist Carrie Frey and cellist Leila Bordreuil add quite a bit, the tracks featuring Karel and Rainey alone are just as rewarding, so rich with conversation that the pair seem to fuse into one brain.

Katarzyna Golla, Weronika Trojańska O wschodzie we Wschodnim

This past May, Polish artist Weronika Trojańska created a soundwalk at a park in the southwestern city of Wroclaw to “[discover] the landscape through the sound memory of this place and [try] to reconstruct it with our voice and body.” Starting the walk at sunrise, she was accompanied by cellist Katarzyna Golla, and the resulting recording depicts an environment waking up sonically. Golla’s sparse, subtle tones meld with rustling wind and chirping birds. Often field recordings can feel pasted on to the music, but here Golla’s playing is thoroughly organic. It often sounds like she’s collaborating with the scene, adding accents to nature and even guiding it, like a frame placed around a picture. In turn, the listener feels immediately transported, easily getting lost in this 22-minute audio trek.

Audrey Lauro In a Living Room &  Prose M​é​tallique

Two new releases by Brussels-based saxophonist Audrey Lauro offer both a range of sounds and a consistent approach. Prose M​é​tallique is a full-length album done solely on the saxophone, comprising seven tracks in which Lauro persistently carves out a sonic path. Sometimes she offers quick runs of notes that can dizzy any brain trying to follow them; at other times, she holds tones and breaks them into repetitive figures. Her playing is so forceful that every moment has a dogged gravity, as if it were the most important part of the piece, until the very next one.

On the shorter, three-track In a Living Room , Lauro offers one sax piece, one flute piece, and a final one played on a “hybrid instrument.” The aura here is more reserved, like a bedroom version of Prose M​é​tallique , but the ideas are all just as vibrant, and the piercing energy of Lauro’s playing remains unabated.

Mackenzie Kourie, Luke Rovinsky & Caleb Duval Beautiful Pigs

On the surface, this set of lengthy tracks by percussionist Mackenzie Kourie, guitarist Luke Rovinsky , and bassist Caleb Duval is jazz improv, so fresh it was released to Bandcamp just two days after it was recorded in mid-October. But even if Beautiful Pigs falls into that category, it dodges expectations many times in its hour-plus duration. Opener “Duroc” launches with guttural rumbles and grinding squeaks that mimic animals, and the following piece “Mangalista” starts with odd static and glitches that feel like a machine breaking down. Along the way, the trio prove quite skilled at familiar sounds too; Rovinsky’s guitar playing in particular is exploratory and responsive, and Duval and Kourie match him well. But my favorite parts of Beautiful Pigs remain the jump cuts and the hard tonal shifts, the spots that only these three at this specific time could’ve come up with.

Onions Layers: 1975​-​2004

Texan collective Onions was formed in the 1970s by Dan Clark aka Lienad Kralc (all band members spell their names backwards), but don’t call him the leader. Part of the point of Onions was to eschew leadership and allow everyone to follow their muse, as well as discard the idea of adding anything like overdubs after the fact. This approach gives Onions’s music immediacy and tension. Things come to life in real time, and they could fall apart at any minute. They rarely do, though, because the group, which grew to 11 members, is skilled both at making interesting sounds and listening to each other. Using conventional rock instruments as well as things like “bike spoke straw,” “clackers,” and “junk,” Onions flew between psych rock, improv noise, and spontaneous composition. The 25 tracks here, culled from nearly 30 years of recordings, are also very funny, sometimes in a cartoonish way, but more often in the absurd joy of brash musical discovery.

Various Artists Audible Bite 2023: Capsule

In the summer of 2023, Stella Silbert curated a series in her Massachusetts backyard, cooking food, serving it, then presenting performances by musicians, poets, and dancers. Audible Bite 2023: Capsule compiles those performances, offering 11 tracks that vary stylistically but cohere by sounding spontaneous and nature-driven. Connecticut duo Tongue Depressor contribute a swath of groaning fiddle explorations; saxophonist Sam Weinberg paints nine pointillist minutes of short, sharp notes; the dance group Loculus Collective build an atmosphere of creepy echoes; Aisha Burns weaves an acoustic folk tune that perfectly melds into the surrounding hiss. Many different approaches to sound and performance show up here, but my favorite is Liz Tonne ’s 12-minute vocal improvisation, which veers from tiny whistles to big bursts of scream and howl that never fail to grab your attention.

Matchess, Stena & Whitney Johnson, Hav

The music of Chicago-based artist Whitney Johnson has always been thoughtful and layered, making summations both difficult and beside the point. As tempting as it is to play compare/contrast with her two new releases—one under her own name, one under her long-time solo moniker Matchess —it’s ultimately futile. Both Hav and Stena are deeply constructed works that take drone and ambience to singular places. There are a few technical differences: Hav was made with sine waves, marimba, viola, and electronics, giving it a more meditative, minimalistic feel.

Stena relies more on found sounds and “frequency experiments,” making it more sonically varied and tactile. But with each album, there are moments of epiphany unique to Johnson’s process: take Hav’s “Amathounta,” an oscillating track that hypnotizes instantly, or Stena’s “Death in Trafo (or, The Crater),” whose opening dissonance melts into a two-chord sway that drifts back and forth forever.

Pat Thomas This is Trick Step

For his latest release, British pianist and composer Pat Thomas went all electronic, smashing together beats, noises and samples in order to, as he puts it, “imagine an alternative universe where J Dilla and Morton Feldman collaborate.” That’s a pretty fair description of the ten tracks on This is Trick Step , where hyperactive beats take center stage but they’re accompanied by blurts, whirrs, and blasts; some in discernible patterns, some evocatively random. Parts evoke Autechre , primarily in the way they can make erratic pulses turn into regular rhythms that then get dismantled. But regardless of reference points, every piece on This is Trick Step is compelling brain-food, chipping away at your neurons so you succumb to its skewed logic. Some of it even gets so comfy you can almost chill to it, but beware: always around the corner lurks some firing beat that’ll wake you the hell up.

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Genre: experimental guitar

Experimental guitar music is a genre that pushes the boundaries of traditional guitar playing techniques and explores unconventional sounds and textures. It often incorporates electronic manipulation of the guitar's sound, creating a unique and otherworldly sonic landscape. This genre is characterized by its avant-garde and improvisational nature, as well as its ability to challenge the listener's expectations.

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• experimental psych
• xenharmonic
• post-minimalism
• australian ambient
• australian experimental
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Best Music of 2022

The 11 best experimental albums of 2022.

OHYUNG's imagine naked! is one of NPR Music's top 11 experimental music albums of 2022. Photo Illustration: Jackie Lay/NPR/Jess X. Snow/Courtesy of the artist hide caption

OHYUNG's imagine naked! is one of NPR Music's top 11 experimental music albums of 2022.

The Best Music of 2022

Music not only has the power to transport but transform. "Experimental" music, a nebulous grouping of difficult-to-classify sounds, provides us lovely, sometimes challenging fractal windows to jump through — to escape, commune, blister and rattle, to try and express our edges and witness the unknown. In 2022, for us, this encompassed microtonal rock jams, tender ambient, woozy nostalgia, Egyptian ghosts and an epic synth symphony.

Below, find an unranked list of the year's most exploratory music, along with some personal favorites, by NPR Music staff and contributors.

Lucrecia Dalt, ¡Ay!

¡Ay! is Lucrecia Dalt 's sci-fi missive from space to Earth; or vice versa. The Colombian experimentalist tells an extraterrestrial's story through bolero, salsa, mambo, son and jazz submerged in a colloquial, nostalgic haze. The alien Preta's interpretations of home, love and the limits of having a body resonate exponentially against a textured, acoustic backdrop, a product of human imagination seeking to operate outside of its chains of time, form and grief. Dalt's world-building in sound and theme are jarring in its invention, yet altogether familiar. —Stefanie Fernández

OHYUNG, imagine naked!

Whenever I needed a pacifier this year — in need of something that would bring me down not just to Earth but safely back to the very apartment room I was likely sitting in, imagine naked! was there. It makes sense: Robert Ouyang Rusli, who records tender ambient like this under the name OHYUNG , based its song titles on lines from a poem by t. tran le, titled "Vegetalscape," that summons deep magic from scenes of the everyday. That Rusli also composes for film makes perfect sense; mine might be titled Post-Pandemic Basement Boy. —Andrew Flanagan

Caterina Barbieri, Spirit Exit

The Italian electronic composer Caterina Barbieri thinks deeply about the spiritual impact of her music on the bodies and minds of others. Her intense album Spirit Exit was created in isolation during Milan's strict pandemic lockdown, inspired by hermetic visionaries including the mystic nun St. Teresa of Ávila and Emily Dickinson. Barbieri's layered tracks build and explode massively into moments of bliss, as if to musically recreate Ávila's ecstatic vision of being stabbed in the heart by an angel. —Hazel Cills

Nancy Mounir, Nozhet El Nofous

Nancy Mounir's Nozhet El Nofous is a conversation with the past. The Cairo-based composer and instrumentalist weaves aching arrangements around crackling recordings of 1920s Egyptian singers. In translations provided, we grasp how Mounir's own violin, bass and piano dance seamlessly with beautiful Arabic poetry of love, torment and darkness — characters who express longing and sorrow with the same nostalgic verve of what Brazilians call saudade . The ghostly effect, however, isn't haunting, but an empathetic hand across time. — Lars Gotrich

Evgueni Galperine, Theory of Becoming

Describing his music as an "augmented reality of acoustic instruments," the Paris-based composer masterfully displays his own personal orchestra of sounds derived from, but unheard in, the real world. Trumpet fanfares get twisted, strings shed a kind of rusty patina and who knows what produces that sublime subterranean bellowing. Each of Evgueni Galperine 's 10 pieces unspool like soundtracks to fevered dreams. In the final vignette, "Loplop im Wald," we're captive deep in the forests of surrealist painter Max Ernst, complete with ominous drum beats, woozy strings and a disturbing whistler. —Tom Huizenga

Gavilán Rayna Russom, Trans Feminist Symphonic Music

At 1 hour, 11 minutes, Trans Feminist Symphonic Music is maybe the only project on our list that, though wordless, successfully expresses as much information as a novella. The piece's first movement, "Elegy," folds and bounces within itself, bringing to mind, in both its aesthetic and its peacefully anxious rhythm, Manuel Göttsching's monumental modular album E2-E4 , from 1984. But unlike Göttsching, tranquility and innovation aren't the aim here; Gavilán Rayna Russom is legibly investigating the futility of binaries through the spooky actions of sound. The discordant meditations in the second movement, "Expansions," slide away for the transfixing and daydreamy "Beauty," before settling into the project's rhetorical core in its final movement, "Truth." The whole is greater than the sum of its already-magnificent parts — its conclusion, which is objectively correct, is that there are no right answers when it comes to the act of human being. —Andrew Flanagan

Joe Rainey, Niineta

Since the age of 8, Joe Rainey — a self-described Ojibwe "urban Indian," raised near Minneapolis' tribal locus of Little Earth — has captured 500 hours of powwow ceremonies, emerging as a powerhouse singer on the competitive circuit himself. Niineta is his debut collaboration with empathetic and attentive producer Andrew Broder; they crosshatch Rainey's archives with his own visceral melismas, turning it into a master storyteller's coat of arms across a ruptured firmament of mauling drums and sculptural squelch. Solemn but funny, vulnerable but aggressive, the messages are gripping, even if the tongue is unfamiliar. Rainey is at the radical edge of a wave of Indigenous experimental expression and acceptance in the United States. Niineta is his undeniable opening statement. —Grayson Haver Currin

Horse Lords, Comradely Objects

Into polyrhythms lately? Want sounds so mathy that they feel like they're made of fractions? Can't find your old copy of Neu! ? Do I have an incredibly specific album for you. Angular Baltimoreans — addicted to the tasty, old-school flavor of the West German avant-garde guitar minimalists — can't help themselves from chugging lavishly with guitars and saxophones for a violently kosmische album that sounds like 40 different looms weaving a tapestry. You would think this whole thing would be fustier per the weight of their admitted influence ("Russian Constructivism," which is to say, a utopian art movement that wants less commodity-fetishism and more utility-fetishism), but this album succeeds for feeling strangely rustic in its human filigree. —Mina Tavakoli

Anna Butterss, Activities

In terms of composition, the bassist Anna Butterss seems to shadow-chop through her songs, finding weak spots in their otherwise sparkling walls to pound a hole for peeking through. What lies beyond is anyone's guess (maybe hers most of all). Activities transitions fluidly and ceaselessly between — literally, between — jazz, classical, pop, avant-dance and nursery rhymes, the work of an artist at near-peak technicality having nothing but fun. —Andrew Flanagan

Ian William Craig, Music for Magnesium_173

Armed with a beautifully trained voice and a bank of custom tape decks that loop, slur and hiss, the Canadian artist has created limitless layers of decaying beauty over the span of 12 tracks. In "Attention For It Radiates," choral flourishes, dressed in William Basinski-like distortion, slowly oscillate, while in "Sprite Percent World Record" a single voice barely surfaces above lovely thickets of drone. Originally composed for a computer game, these expansive, slow-motion canvasses, with their desiccated resplendence, stand completely on their own and remain among the most arresting and immersive music released this year. —Tom Huizenga

Björk, fossora

The global grief we've shared during the last few years didn't limit, of course, our individual suffering; it merely made those cuts deeper. Björk used the space of the pandemic to consider her mother's 2018 death and how the influence of a mortal may become immortal through others, reaching ever outward like a mushroom's hyphae. The result, fossora , is a riot of new growth after a deluge. Armies of meticulous if vertiginous woodwinds and strings prance around Björk's singular voice , able to command and comfort at once. "Hope is a muscle that allows us to connect," she beams three minutes in, relentless hardcore drums hammering home this point so that we may never again forget it. These love songs, arguably the most audacious of her career, are brilliant blooms at a perceived new dawn. —Grayson Haver Currin

And 10 more, in no particular order:

Patrick Shiroishi, Evergreen Patrick Shiroishi made 18 records in 2022, all compelling; his finale, Evergreen , is the most exquisite. Using field recordings from the Los Angeles cemetery where his ancestors are buried, the saxophonist builds lush meditative spaces for considering the power that past holds over present. —Grayson Haver Currin

Rachika Nayar, Heaven Come Crashing A mesmerizing album that blends soul-crushing electronica and the Brooklyn composer's gloomy, signature guitar into a cinematic opus. —Hazel Cills

Bill Orcutt, Music for Four Guitars This is antechamber music spit like a piping-hot tar-loogie from the punkest guitar player ever. Yet these choppy, euphoric miniatures are somehow beautiful in their psychic bleed-through. — Lars Gotrich

Peter Coccoma, A Place to Begin Peter Coccoma's annual, winterly sojourn to a sparse island on Lake Superior sitting just off the coast of Minnesota's arrowhead was extended indefinitely by a certain global displeasure not too many years ago. The composer enjoyed the trapped time, though, and spent it well, fastidiously outlining the soul of a unique and quiet corner of the world in these sparse, lush pieces. —Andrew Flanagan

Clarice Jensen, Esthesis Lighter on the drones this time, the restless cellist and composer explores a broader sound world with help from pianist Timo Andres, in music layered with sensations. —Tom Huizenga

claire rousay, wouldn't have to hurt At its best, claire rousay's work can function like a poignant film score, with subtle layers of sound — iridescent electronics, spare piano — highlighting the emotional core of seemingly pedestrian moments. This absorbing EP stares down suffering and tries to transmute it into anything tolerable, be it friendship or mere understanding. —Grayson Haver Currin

Marina Herlop, Pripyat The Catalan composer's album is a work of truly alien music, twisting her freaky, high vocals and piano into soundscapes not of this world. —Hazel Cills

Vanessa Rossetto, The Actress Rossetto layers field recordings and instruments not as a canvas but emotional portraits that you move with your mind. An experience that changes on every listen. —Lars Gotrich

Tanya Tagaq, Tongues "They tried to take our tongues," the Inuk throat singer murmurs on this potent manifesto, demanding to reclaim what colonization has stolen from her culture. —Tom Huizenga

Lamin Fofana, The Open Boat The Sierra Leonean producer gives us a mysterious map, but there doesn't seem to be a ship capable of navigating its extraterrestrial electronics and submerged beats. —Lars Gotrich

• Nancy Mounir
• Evgueni Galperine
• Lucrecia Dalt
• Caterina Barbieri
• Anna Butterss
• Horse Lords
• Ian William Craig
• Gavilán Rayna Russom

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The Best Jazz and Experimental Music of 2021

Whether recorded remotely, live, or in-studio, the jazz and experimental music that left the biggest impression this year did so primarily because it challenged us to find momentum in life. In jazz, Anthony Joseph summoned Shabaka Hutchings and Jason Yarde for a quest to take political poetry as far as he could, and the Luke Stewart & Jarvis Earnshaw Quartet crafted a set split between meditative rumination and active discontent. In experimental music, Bill Orcutt overdubbed himself on an expansive collaboration with Chris Corsano, the Vietnamese trio Rắn Cạp Đuôi spliced together inscrutable psychedelic collages, and Fire-Toolz delivered a double LP packed with everything from screamo to ambient.

While it would be difficult to land on one element that is shared by the records and songs here, not one of these musicians took the beaten path. Model Home lengthened their cut-up jams, Carmen Q. Rothwell allowed the city to add another dimension to her upright bass-filled songs of regret, and ---__--___ (the musicians Seth Graham and More Eaze) produced a crushing soundscape out of manipulated vocals.

Below, we round out entries culled from our overall albums list and overall songs list with more releases just as worthy of your time, listed alphabetically.

Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2021 wrap-up coverage here .

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

Orange Milk

---__--___: The Heart Pumps Kool​-​Aid

Orange Milk co-founder Seth Graham and Austin electronic artist More Eaze are the animating forces behind The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid , their first record together. The pair’s warped electro-acoustic arrangements bridge the void between feral noise and gauzy glimmer. Vocals from guests like Karen Ng, recovery girl, and Koeosaeme are processed to such a degree that they sound like travelers teleporting through the uncanny valley. Strings snarl and howl alongside twisting electronic gnarls on “Sadness, Infinite America … shit,” yielding to the delicate sparkle that leads the early stretch of “In Memory of Simon Kingston” (a song commemorating a New York musician who died at 21 last year). As a harsh vocal scrape interrupts its glistening surface, the record’s collision of elegant idealism and astringent reality is crystallized. –Allison Hussey

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Heavenly Sweetness

Anthony Joseph: The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives

Little distinction exists between speech and music on The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives , which the British-Trinidadian poet Anthony Joseph assembled with a crew of jazz players including saxophonist-composer-arranger Jason Yarde and multi-reed wizard Shabaka Hutchings. Joseph brings the cadence of solos to his declamations of personal and diasporic history, placing musicality at the center of his poetry. When he recounts being “flung so far from any notion of nation” as a young immigrant on “Calling England Home,” his voice gathers depth and grit like a horn breaking into its woody lower register. The saxes, in turn, offer speechlike interjections, conveying urgent and expressive solidarity with every phrase. –Andy Cush

New Amsterdam

Arooj Aftab: Vulture Prince

​​When the Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab started recording Vulture Prince , she had no plans for an elegy. But then her brother died, as did a close friend. In tracing the shape of these new absences in her life, her mind went to the Urdu ghazals of her childhood, music and poetry filled with boundless, near-erotic longing for God. Aftab reimagined these ghazals, scored for only soft, stringed instruments—harp, stand-up bass, acoustic guitar, some violin. These sounds call clearly to each other across moonlit space, and Aftab’s voice cuts a path through the darkness in front of it, one line, one footfall, at a time. Jarred out of time, her grief (and ours) softens and grows overwhelmingly beautiful. –Jayson Greene

Arushi Jain: “Richer Than Blood”

“Richer Than Blood,” the opening track on Brooklyn-based composer Arushi Jain’s debut album Under the Lilac Sky , is deceptively simple. It only consists of two elements: her gentle vocals and the burbling drones of a modular synth. And yet, Jain makes each tool at her disposal feel so much grander: She layers her vocals to sound like a room full of singers harmonizing with each other, and she uses her synth to mimic the effect of an entire string orchestra tuning their instruments before a performance. It’s an introduction that leaves you breathlessly anticipating whatever comes next. —Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Arushi Jain, “Richer Than Blood”

Carmen Q. Rothwell: Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere

Carmen Q. Rothwell sings of grief and heartbreak with remarkable restraint across Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere , her debut album. Often, she’s accompanied by little more than her own harmonies, as on the opening “Don’t Get Comfy.” And, on the lead single “Blissful Ignore,” the New York singer-songwriter and upright bassist allows her voice to follow the melodic counters of her instrument, letting car honks and more city noises leak into the song—it feels like watching her perform through an open window. The album thrives on the meeting of reservation and vulnerability, and its songs feel as emotional and virtuosic as a power ballad yet are sparse and withholding as a Rembrandt. –Matthew Strauss

Chris Corsano / Bill Orcutt: Made Out of Sound

With its first notes, Made Out of Sound departs from previous recordings by the long-running free-improv team of guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Chris Corsano: There are two guitars here, not just one. Where albums like 2018’s Brace Up! had the searing in-the-moment intensity of live documents, this one was assembled remotely from opposite coasts. Rather than try to mask the artifice, Orcutt leans into it by doubling himself, turning their duo into a virtual trio. Perhaps as a result, Made Out of Sound is oceanic where past records were pointillistic, enveloping you in waves of harmony rather than pushing you through hairpin turns. The overdubs—and the chiaroscuro cover photo—suggest an affinity with Odds Against Tomorrow , Orcutt’s solo masterpiece from 2019. Like that record, Made Out of Sound is often breathtakingly beautiful, albeit in unconventional ways, finding moments of serenity and contemplation amid the turbulence. –Andy Cush

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify

Circuit des Yeux: “Dogma”

A dear friend’s death, a lonely artist residency, an intractable bout of writer’s block: Circuit des Yeux mastermind Haley Fohr was having a hell of a hard go of things. “Dogma,” the militantly lithe rock track on - io , an album of otherwise pillowy orchestral dimensions, serves as Fohr’s stubborn note-to-self: Keep moving and keep busy, and you might just keep it together. “Tell me how to feel right/Tell me how to see the light,” she commands over drums so mighty they stanch the synthesizer din creeping beneath her. Through this forward motion, she cultivates the strength to survive, at least until answers about what’s next come easier. –Grayson Haver Currin

Listen: Circuit des Yeux, “Dogma”

American Dreams

Claire Rousay: a softer focus

Scattered throughout Claire Rousay’s a softer focus are snippets of her daily life: the sounds of a typewriter, a blaring swirl of cicadas, barely audible conversations. Swathed in swells of drone, half-remembered melodies, and strings saturated with melancholy, these prosaic sounds become monumental, activating a powerful sense of nostalgia for moments of quiet reflection and human connection. The abstract pieces on a softer focus are made potent by their suggestive familiarity, each sound a potential trigger for our own memories—happy, sad, or, more likely, somewhere in between. –Jonathan Williger

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Rough Trade

Dean Blunt: Black Metal 2

The latest cryptic transmission from British singer-songwriter Dean Blunt is unsparing yet beautiful in its quest for hope in an increasingly despondent world. Blunt refuses allegiance to any single ideology, preferring instead to sprinkle provocative questions about Black rage before vanishing into the shadows. He perfects this approach in the taunting yet empathetic final lines of “MUGU”: “Let it out, nigga, let it out,” he sighs, “show them crackers what you’re all about.” Black Metal 2 doesn’t concede any of Dean Blunt’s mystique, but it’s the closest to a straight answer he’s given yet. –Brandon Callender

Eli Keszler: Icons

When the COVID-19 shutdown kept people inside , percussionist and composer Eli Keszler turned his attention to the emptied streets. Icons uses on-location recordings of an uncharacteristically calm pandemic-era New York City to frame foreboding ambient mood pieces defined by vibraphone, glockenspiel, piano, and drums. An uneasy percussive skitter underlies the gleaming sound of gamelan bars on “Evenfall,” and Keszler finds a similar impressionistic beauty in the still of decline throughout the album. –Evan Minsker

Hausu Mountain

Fire-Toolz: Eternal Home

In the ’80s and ’90s, thrifty punk bands sometimes dubbed albums onto cassettes that they’d gotten (or stolen) for free from Christians or motivational speakers. If you focused your ears, you might catch a hint of the original audio grayed out between blasts of hardcore. Angel Marcloid’s Eternal Home operates on a similar principle: It’s a bizarre palimpsest piling up layers of progressive rock, Weather Channel synths, classical minimalism, IDM beat trickery, and screamo. Unlike those lo-fi tapes of yore, though, the Chicago musician’s work is almost shockingly hi-def, every grunge-inspired guitar solo, DX7 chime, and larynx-shredding howl leaping from the speakers in a blast of finely chiseled violence. Yet for all the sensory overload of Marcloid’s 78-minute opus, Eternal Home makes for a surprisingly immersive and even welcoming listen once you acclimate to its everything-goes-to-11 aesthetics. And if you’re looking for hidden messages, Marcloid’s mantra-like lyrics—“I’m owed strength now”; “We may as well be mushrooms”—offer plenty to puzzle over, buried beneath the barrage of stimuli. –Philip Sherburne

Floating Points / Pharoah Sanders / The London Symphony Orchestra: Promises

It begins atomically, with a building block made of seven notes twisting around like a helix. Around this motif Promises blinks to life, a self-regenerating ecosystem in nine movements. This hybrid electronic/jazz/orchestral piece doesn’t feel composed so much as monitored by Sam Shepherd, the boundless electronic composer who performs as Floating Points. Whether arranging the London Symphony Orchestra’s oceanic swells or tapping out notes on a harpsichord that seems to be falling slightly out of tune, Shepherd lays down a framework for the eminent free jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders to follow and then thrillingly disregard.

Sanders is the central voice and shining star of Promises , his first major recording in a couple of decades, and one of 2021’s greatest musical gifts. He trots to one idea, floats to another, then sprints to a third, exploring the universe Shepherd has cast for him and spinning out new meanings for its restless, incessant seven-note central motif. This is the endless joy of Promises : listening to Sanders feel his way through this alien world as if newly born into it. It leaves such a unique impression that although you are listening to music, you are also witnessing its evolution. –Jeremy D. Larson

Grouper: Shade

Grouper’s Liz Harris pulls you in close on Shade . Her new songs are characteristically intimate, offering quiet truths and rapturous noise that require close focus. The individual components feel familiar—the hushed vocals, tape hiss, and sound of fingertips sliding up guitar strings—but Harris’ fingerpicked melodies and gutting poetry manage to explore new depths of her bottomless sound. Lean in enough and you’ll hear her ponder the light and the clouds, contending with the gravitational pull of darkness: “Bury those thoughts real deep/Bury those bodies deep/Put us back to sleep.” It’s a crushing flash of insight delivered like a whispered secret. –Evan Minsker

Mexican Summer

L’Rain: Fatigue

In the hands of Brooklyn artist Taja Cheek, music can be nonlinear and unpredictable without sacrificing grooves and hooks. As L’Rain, her blend of hi- and lo-fi techniques spawns songs that call for a half-dozen genre descriptors—avant-garde, psych-soul, with a side of musique concrète?—and refuse to resolve in an expected way. Her second album, Fatigue , is a symphony of fleeting, hyper-specific sound, from the opulent keyboard arpeggios that open “Two Face” and the swampy bass driving “Suck Teeth” to the heartfelt guitar interplay on “Blame Me” and the ingenuous rhythmic repetition of the phrase “make a way out of no way”—a line borrowed from Cheek’s late mother, Lorraine—on “Find It.” L’Rain songs can be one small idea or 10 overlapping ones, 17 seconds or six minutes, built around a single loop or encompassing upwards of 20 players. The works on Fatigue mimic the nature of grief and change, the haze and backsliding and dark thoughts. Through these vivid fragments, Cheek’s worldview comes across clearly: The best way to achieve growth is through unhindered exploration. –Jillian Mapes

Sargent House

Lingua Ignota: Sinner Get Ready

Kristin Hayter’s voice, stacked tall atop itself, holds you from a terrifying height. On her latest album as Lingua Ignota, she reckons with devotion and loneliness in rural Pennsylvania, using its spare landscape and its musical and religious history as the fertile backdrop for her work. Between Appalachian instruments and prepared piano, she sings like she’s on the cusp of physical collapse, running her voice ragged only for it to surge into a roar. The point where exhaustion snaps into adrenaline is her starting ground. From there, she traces the contours of human faith, gumming the jagged edges where it breaks. –Sasha Geffen

Luke Stewart & Jarvis Earnshaw Quartet: Luke Stewart & Jarvis Earnshaw Quartet

Luke Stewart and Jarvis Earnshaw create a fiery set of titanic jazz, exploring the possibilities of the genre by moving from transcendental meditation to off-center bebop. Stewart’s bass is swift, and it’s easy to be left stunned by how quickly his hands seem to be running across the instrument. Earnshaw’s sitar is used equally for creation and destruction, bringing the former with gentle picking and the latter with improvisation. Devan Waldman’s sprightly alto sax solos and Ryan Sawyer’s tempered drumming elevate the proceedings further, enhancing the sense that you are hearing the players push themselves towards something new. -Hubert Adjei-Kontoh

MATTIE: “Human Thing”

A cybernetic cry into the wilderness, this single from MATTIE appeared out of the ether towards the beginning of March and has yet to wear out its welcome. Produced by MATTIE and Black Taffy, “Human Thing” is a stuttering behemoth of burnt-out snares, guttural bass, and MATTIE's inimitable yelp. Lying somewhere between a club banger and an industrial rock number, this track imprisons you in its reverb in order to ask, “Have you ever loved a human?” -Hubert Adjei-Kontoh

Listen: MATTIE, “Human Thing”

Don Giovanni

Model Home: both feet en th infinite

Listening to Model Home ’s both feet en th infinite feels like stumbling upon some mysterious radio frequency—if you bump your dial up a millimeter, you might lose it forever. The new album from the Washington D.C. duo sounds subterranean, emanating from a basement cluttered with cables and mixing boards. Vocalist NappyNappa and electronic tinkerer Patrick Cain take a painterly approach to their songs, shading them with strokes of space-age funk, grimy disco, and underground hip-hop. Tracks like “Ambition” and “Body Power,” with their peripheral chatter and rambling lyrics, harness the spirit of an impromptu performance at a house show—a snapshot of one night that can never be fully replicated. —Madison Bloom

Moor Mother: Black Encyclopedia of the Air

On her first release for eclectic indie mainstay ANTI-, experimental noise poet Moor Mother transmits radical messages softly. Black Encyclopedia of the Air is far more hushed than her harsh dispatches of the past. The album nods to ’90s R&B, ambient, and cosmic jazz, and is packed with features from her expanding artistic community including Alabama’s Pink Siifu, and members of her own Philadelphia-based collective, Black Quantum Futurism. Moor Mother mines the same wreckage that she has always confronted—particularly the prolonged effects of intergenerational trauma—but here, she conquers it in a state of relative tranquility. –Madison Bloom

Nala Sinephro: Space 1.8

Space 1.8 earns its astronomical title through frontier-breaking ambition. Its influences are distinctly throwback—Eric Dolphy’s investigations of the clarinet, both Coltranes’ search for an infinite cry—but the album isn’t content to replicate what worked in the past. London’s Nala Sinephro, utilizing both the harp and synthesizer, guides her band through a muted rumble that pricks the ears with both small deviations and seismic overtures alike. It’s heavy music delivered with a light touch. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh

Subtext / Multiverse

Rắn Cạp Đuôi: Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế

Rắn Cạp Đuôi, a trio based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, works largely via improvisation, a practice you can hear through the boundless, structureless recordings on their debut album, Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế . The group then stitches together those pieces digitally, a process that becomes evident through the abrupt cuts and shifts that make the album feel like a glitching, psychedelic collage, inverting the atmosphere right when you think they’ve settled into a groove. Often, they highlight the ghostly, in-between states of their performances, as in the highlight “Aztec Glue,” which incorporates their closest thing to a conventional melody between a staticky procession of pulsing synths. By the time you think you’ve figured out what this sound is, they’ve already moved on to a new one. This volatility may be the point. —Sam Sodomsky

Carrying Colour

Rosie Lowe / Duval Timothy: Son

The emotions that Duval Timothy can unleash with a simple series of chords is unparalleled, and on this collaborative album with the English singer Rosie Lowe, he manages to make 20 minutes feel like an eternity. On the titular track, Lowe’s vocals are transformed from a whispered lullaby to a firmament-shaking choir. With minimal instrumentation, the two create a towering hymn that yawns into the distance. It’s the type of album where each track has enough gravitas to be an album closer, yet the actual conclusion “Gonna Be” manages to reach a level of intensity that catches you in your throat. High pitched voices sing “gonna be,” and they are paired with piano and double bass (played by Tom Herbert). As the song ends, only the double bass is left playing, delivering you into its mighty resonance. -Hubert Adjei-Kontoh

Self-released

Shubh Saran: Inglish

Inglish —the second full-length from guitarist, composer, and producer Shubh Saran —sprouted from several entwined roots. The Bangladesh-born son of Indian diplomats, Saran lived in Dhaka, Cairo, Geneva, New Delhi, Toronto, and Boston before planting himself in New York City around 2014. Saran’s new album is a product of his multinational upbringing, incorporating Middle Eastern folk, progressive rock, Indian classical, and more in its unique jazz fusion. Inglish places bright electric guitar and modular synthesizers alongside instruments from India and the Middle East, often within the same song. Sprawling opener “Enculture” begins as a high-speed race through the desert, before careening into stretches of free jazz piano and skronking synth riffs that nod to Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.” With these discrete elements, Saran forms a language all his own. —Madison Bloom

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Sacred Bones

SPELLLING: “Little Deer” 

Bay Area art-pop sorcerer Tia Cabral of SPELLLING reintroduced herself with “Little Deer,” the surging baroque opener of her fantastical third album The Turning Wheel . Evoking the audacious spirits of forebears like Minnie Riperton and Kate Bush, it is a fable-like tale of death and rebirth, of the never-quite-finished process of being a person. Joined by over a dozen musicians—brass, strings, woodwinds, conga, a choir—Cabral brings pop formalism and the questing spirit of ’70s soul orchestration into SPELLLING’s world, making a majestic entry into her sharpest album yet. –Jenn Pelly

Listen: SPELLLING, “Little Deer”

Tirzah: Colourgrade

The voltaic second album from London electronic artist Tirzah revolves around a close-knit, labyrinthine, and slightly crooked emotionality. Working alongside collaborators Mica Levi and Coby Sey, she reduces her formula to elemental parts in order to bring out a more tactile intimacy guided by improvisatory songwriting, looped samples, and ad-libbed vocals. The sparse impressions on tracks like the out-of-step “Beating” and the unsettled “Crepuscular Rays” are the result of years of friendship and community melted down into what sounds like a close, honest embrace. –Eric Torres

Tomu DJ: FEMINISTA

Tomu DJ finds safety in warm, loosely familiar spaces on FEMINISTA , her first full-length record. The California producer turned to music as she recovered from a traumatic 2019 car accident, and FEMINISTA extends her reach for reassurance. Indebted to club music at its core, the record opens with gentle pop-leaning numbers before leaping into more frenetic, skittering textures, each one stretching out into a self-contained universe. In addition to drawing on reggaetón, Top 40 Pop, and footwork, Tomu DJ has cited Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope as a heavy influence for her work. While FEMINISTA never quite makes a direct nod at its foremother, a kindred hazy sensuality shines through. –Allison Hussey

The Buddy System

Tyshawn Sorey / King Britt: “Untitled One”

“Untitled One,” the opening entry on drummer Tyshawn Sorey and producer King Britt’s self-titled album, is a hypnotic highwire act that careens towards improvisatory chaos yet ultimately keeps its balance. Britt grounds the track with calm synthetic notes before Sorey ventures toward the unknown, playing his drums rapidly and inviting Britt to experiment more, too. Britt responds in turn by playing his synthesizers more freely, and they grow louder and wilder before finally settling back into a metronomic groove. Britt and Sorey know just how much to give and how much to hold back on “Untitled One,” lest they lose their footing. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: Tyshawn Sorey / King Britt, “Untitled One”

Vijay Iyer / Linda May Han Oh / Tyshawn Sorey: Uneasy

Jazz maestro Vijay Iyer articulates the urgency of protest without shirking the sentimental on this album recorded with longtime collaborators Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey. Iyer’s pin-heeled piano work hot-steps around in search of a sacred chord to alight upon, leaving shallow punctures across your heart as Oh and Sorey’s storm-flung rhythm section executes stomach-lurching shifts. Volatility abounds: The raucous paean “Combat Breathing” honors Eric Garner and Black Lives Matter with music that’s by turns fluid and transfixed, the sound of righteous fury opening channels for electricity to course between the many. –Jazz Monroe