Where do the boundaries of music lay? When does it end and something wild and undefinable starts? Like rows of planted trees give way to the wilds, massive jungle, impossible to pass. Today we’re investigating purely experimental music, so varied and uncategorizable.

1. Adhelm – Yasam Rose (2020)

🇬🇧 Through beats and noises, we get into the weird jungle. Here, you feel forceful nature and traces of human impact as well.

British sound producer Beni Giles, also known as Adhelm, goes deeply into the matter of sound. Selected percussion, electronic tricks, strange structures. That’s are the author’s tools to build mysterious atmosphere full of tactile sounds. You’ll somehow sneak into it, and will literally feel connected with it.

“Chaos and order”, so illusory delineation, does not exist really in the world. So let us walk in, and see with the eyes wide open.

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2. Sturle Dagsland – Sturle Dagsland (2021)

🇳🇴 Keep away your epithets and labels, that can’t help. If you expect anything, forget it. But even if you prepare yourself and stick to your aspirations, Sturle will destroy all these ridiculous aids.

Here the sound bursts, whether it’s irrepressible vocals, or electronic background, or acoustic instruments used at their full force. Evolving from gawky stillness to a sledgehammer explosion, this music keeps being off the beaten track.

Off the scale expression is Sturle’s weapon to open your eyes wide and to boost your heart. Reacting to this experience, you won’t realize when you’ll become a part of what’s happening.

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3. Elektricheskaya Sobaka – Yabadabadubuda (2020)

🇷🇺 What comes to your mind, when you meet the “Yabadabadubuda” title? Something senseless? Occasional sounds pronounced by a toddler? Fragment of African chant? Or is it a code received from the aliens?

Well, you won’t receive an answer after a listen to this debut album by Moscow-based trio either. Maybe because there’s no need for answer. You just jump into, and nothing holds you back.

This album is truly scatterbrained, seasoned by spontaneous rhythms coming out of nowhere, drones that disturb at first, and then settle somewhere in subconsciousness. Thick improvisations, courageous and erratic, raw stuff with harmonies and disharmonies buried inside.

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4. Morita Vargas – 8 (2020)

🇦🇷 Morita Vargas is a contemporary artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

This album seems calm and soothing in the very beginning. However, as you move forward, new dimensions slowly unveil. With the whispers, echoes and beats, comes the sensation that Morita is dealing with the kinds of primordial matter, with something that stays itself regardless of human fate.

Strong accent on the vocals in self-invented language, electronic ambience meeting traditional instruments like chajchas, cajón or kalimba, multiple reverbs and looping. All these tools are involved to draw pretty unusual audial paintings, and to bewitch a listener by them.

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5. Lucia Martínez / Agustí Fernández / Barry Guy – Bosque De Niebla (2021)

🇪🇸 🇬🇧 This album is a result of outstanding collaboration. Three thinkers, in combination – virtuosos who ride the sound so masterfully that we don’t even think about any comparison.

Piano, double bass and drums, a conventional set for ultimate improvisations. Supplement some amount of voice, percussion, cracklebox with these scratches, squeaks and other variations of individual sounds, and you’ll get the unmeasurable world of Foggy Forest.

Here you’ll find beasts and humans, abrupt thoughts and freedom of the imagination. Everything in one place, in one moment of listening.

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6. Contagious – Contagious (2019)

🇩🇪 Contagious present a self-titled album. It appears to be a collection of entirely improvised tracks, built up from manually managed artificial sounds. Sabine Ercklentz engages an elegant trumpet, while Andrea Neumann wields her “inside piano”, and Mieko Suzuki is responsible for turntables.

In the same time, these three ladies use their electronic tools, which snatch external sounds and melt all these things into the audial alloy.

Within “Contagious”, as the compositions’ titles tell, the strangest creatures live. Meet them with attention, as you can turn to one of them easily.

Get this album via bandcamp | spotify

7. George Lewis – The Recombinant Trilogy (2021)

🇺🇸 This album is going to interact with your DNA. American legend George Lewis dismantles the sounds, takes small sonic genes and amplifies new patterns.

Flute, cello, or bassoon receive their digital incarnations. Interactive system transform acoustic sounding into audial continuum with both complicated and simplified elements.

It is barely a single story that we expect. Instead of a narrative, it’s a world where the structures stratify, intersecting with their initial meanings, acquiring modifications, emerging and disappearing in the same time.

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8. Martina Claussen – Verwoben (2020)

🇦🇹 During years, Austrian sound artist Martina Claussen has been collaborating with experimenters of all ranges. Now, the time for her solo album has come.

The “Verwoben”, or “Interwoven” album has a perfect name. Here, acoustic, electronic and human voices are so deeply intertwined into each other, that it’s impossible to untwist this thread.

Strange place, weird ambient, hypnotized state. Forget about reality and dissolve yourself, letting the sound interweave you. Don’t forget about visual part of the project, as it bears its inner sense.

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9. Upperground Orchestra – Euganea (2019)

🇮🇹 “Euganea” by Upperground Orchestra continues our chart of overwhelming acts. Italian collective unites the musicians with diverse experiences, aspiring to create something unexpected and barely able to exist.

They are Rabih Beaini (spatula, electronics), Piero Bittolo Bon (alto sax, bass clarinet, flute, and electronics), Alvise Seggi (bass, oud), and Tommaso Cappellato (drums, percussions). Growing from jazzy, oriental and contemporary music, extensively using electronics, this orchestra offers unforgettable journey into the maze of sound, with no guidance and help.

Electro-acoustic jungle embraces a listener and gradually macerates the membrane between the person and the outer world.

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10. Ensemble de Cadavres Exquis – The Warlock Tapes (2021)

🇬🇧 This album was born out of sheer experimentation. 10 authors, 10 pieces, plenty of ideas, which leaks out, crawl out and break out the imagination.

The list of participants included Mark Fox, Jaime Munárriz, Rutger Van Driel, Nathan James Carter, Volker Bauland, Hans Castrup, {AN} EeL, Gordon Way, Cousin Silas & Gabriel On. Each of them received the same root track and created own piece of sound, being unable to know others’ contribution to the project.

The final result collected all the compositions into a single album, which absorbed parties and sound samples, in unpredictable and undirected way. One can say that we listen to ten voices in one time, organized into something incomprehensible.

Get this album via bandcamp