Experimental Music challenges familiar ideas about composition, rhythm, instrumentation and listening. The field ranges from electronic processing and improvisation to unconventional recording methods, extended techniques, chance procedures and sound-based research.
Ikue Mori’s move from a drum kit to drum machines in the mid-1980s was not a search for tighter time. She took machines designed to supply dependable backing rhythms into improvised music, where listening and immediate response matter more than repetition. Eventually she was orchestrating three drum machines with effects and a digital mixer before…
For The Sirens, Geologist and visual artist Kyle Simon did not use the night sky as a theme added after the music was made. At Simon’s Farrington Observatory in Joshua Tree, light from the moon, stars and planets entered a telescope fitted with optical sensors and photodiodes. An analogue amplifier converted that changing light into…
Kali Malone recorded her forthcoming album Burning Song during two late-night sessions at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, the church where Johann Sebastian Bach served as cantor. Malone became the first musician to perform contemporary works on the church’s Bach Organ, an instrument completed in 2000 and designed around historical Baroque tuning principles. Engineer Francesco Donadello placed more…
Maryanne Amacher did not simply compose sounds for rooms. She wanted the rooms themselves to behave acoustically. In her Music for Sound-Joined Rooms installations, she worked with sound transmitted through architectural structures, using walls, floors, corridors and connected spaces to shape what listeners heard and physically felt. Her own description is wonderful: rooms, walls and…
Around 1970, Annette Peacock was doing something with synthesizers that still feels surprisingly modern: using a Moog modular system to process her voice in real time. The Bob Moog Foundation documents how Peacock and pianist Paul Bley toured Europe with an ARP synthesizer and Moog modules, with Peacock using the Moog specifically for vocal modification.…
Laurie Anderson’s Self-Playing Violin from 1974 contained a speaker and amplifier inside the instrument. A prerecorded violin part played from the body while Anderson could perform another part live on the strings. One violin effectively contained two performers. That idea seems simple now because looping is everywhere. A pedal can record a phrase in seconds…
Arthur Russell arrived in New York as an experimental cellist and composer. Then, in 1977, an unexpected visit to a disco changed the direction of his work. Instead of treating club music as intellectually inferior to experimental composition, Russell became fascinated by repetition and by what happened socially when people shared it on a dancefloor.…
Pauline Oliveros developed Deep Listening from a deceptively simple distinction: hearing happens continuously, while listening involves attention. Her practice expanded from experimental composition and electroacoustic music into exercises that asked musicians and non-musicians to listen not only to performed sound but also to environments, thoughts and sounds normally filtered from awareness. The idea feels increasingly…
Bendik Giske takes ideas associated with electronic and club music and tries to produce them physically with saxophone, breath and microphones. He has described his approach as playing the building blocks of electronic music live, without layering or looping wherever possible. That limitation immediately changes the sound. A sequencer never runs out of breath. A…
Oren Ambarchi’s Quixotism unfolds as a single long composition divided into five parts. At its foundation sits double-time electronic percussion by Thomas Brinkmann. Around that pulse, guitar, strings, electronics and other contributions gradually enter and disappear. The transitions can happen so slowly that the listener notices the new state before noticing exactly when the change…
