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. March’s selection includes a father and son electroacoustic duo, a Japanese saxophonist teaming with rock musicians, noise about hating your job, and improvisation with balloons.
Khabat Abas & Caroline Kraabel
5 Communiqués
This past January, Iraqi cellist Khabat Abas met with California-born, London-based saxophonist Caroline Kraabel at the University of London’s Electronic Music Studio for a set of, as the album title puts it, “Communiqués.” Most of the tracks here are relatively lengthy (four last longer than 10 minutes) giving the players ample room to exchange and explore ideas. The music is generally sparse, with lots of pauses and silence, yet what Abas and Kraabel do play is consistently surprising and thoroughly conversational as sounds react to and comment on each other in small bursts. This is the kind of minimalist improvisation that focuses your ears, making you keenly aware of even the smallest sonic events.
Lisa Cameron & Alex Cunningham
Chasms
Compact Disc (CD)
Chasms is an interesting title choice for this collaboration between multi-instrumentalists Lisa Cameron and Alex Cunningham. On the one hand, some of the wavy, drone-circling sounds in the three tracks here do sound like the gaping yawns of an abyss or perhaps a wind tunnel inside a cave. But on the other hand, there’s really no space between this pair. Their combination of percussion, violin, bowed cymbals, and myriad other sources join together in tight conversation, making it hard (and unnecessary) to figure out who’s playing what. Cameron and Cunningham are both such skilled, sensitive improvisers that Chasms has its own singular language, one that only these two are fluent in.
Rhodri Davies
Creiriau y Delyn Rawn / Relics of the Horsehair Harp
Compact Disc (CD)
You can think of this new Rhodri Davies release as a novel take on the remix album. Instead of asking artists to rework the sounds on his 2020 solo album Telyn Rawn, Davies requested that they each create a new piece in response, as if his work “was an ancient musical form that had fully existed in the medieval period.” The results are diverse: Laura Cannell offers a phalanx of recorders playing with each other; C. Spencer Yeh generates cuts and glitches with “computer and mouse”; Richard Dawson slowly strums his guitar with birds chirping around him, and Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh saws out a sunny vibe with her viola. The spirit of Davies’s original recording comes through in these novel creations, but what shines brightest is the unabashed creativity of the participants, a credit to Davies’s excellent choice of artists to interpret his work.
Reishu Fukushima & Satoshi Fukushima
Inter-Others
Vinyl LP
Since the 1990s, Reishu Fukushima has improvised on the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute made of bamboo. Here he teams up for the first time with his son Satoshi, who makes electroacoustic music via computer processing. The four tracks they created sit in the space between playing and editing, between making sounds on the spot and reworking them into something less recognizably human. Satoshi’s ability to layer and splice his father’s devout tones make for an almost eerie experience, as if the notes from the shakuhachi are becoming ghosts in real-time. Throughout, each track fades and regenerates simultaneously, making the cover art—a photo of the pair blurred just enough to spark your imagination—a perfect representation of their tantalizing music.
Ayumi Ishito
Roboquarians, Vol. 1
Raised in Japan, saxophonist Ayumi Ishito has lived in New York since 2010, leading her own quintet as well as collaborating with like-minded musicians around the city. Two such players are guitarist George Draguns and drummer Kevin Shea, who were members of Storm and Stress in the late ’90s and have since mixed with many compatriots as well. For their first album, Ishito guides the trio through improvisations that sound like free jazz dipped into a punk-rock fire and burned until it sparks. Her sax sounds are continually inventive, sometimes almost sounding electronic, while Draguns and Shea brew up a ton of rolling storms behind her. At times their mix even evokes acid-soaked psych rock, but every time you think you have Roboquairans pegged, it takes another sharp turn.
People Skills
Subalternity Interlude
Cassette
As People Skills, Philadelphia-based musician Jesse Dewlow has made unpredictable music for going on 15 years. One of his strongest skills is the ability to make calm, quiet pieces that nonetheless poke, prod, and disturb, often through loops that seem to grow while sitting still. Subalternity Interlude opens with a 17-minute track called “The Transparency of Evil” that’s distant and echoey, like a horror movie soundtrack slowed and faded into oblivion. The rest of the album has a similarly discomforting feel, filled with sounds that seem safe enough on the surface but always carry an undercurrent of danger. Particularly menacing is perhaps the quietest piece, “Pataphysical Climax,” which sounds like something is going to jump out from a corner at any moment, but never does.
Li Song, Zhao Cong & Zhu Wenbo
3 lines and balloons
Cassette
The title of this live-recorded collaboration between Li Song, Zhao Cong, and Zhu Wenbo is literal. During a South China tour in September of last year, the trio performed one set of what Wenbo calls the “3 lines” feedback system, which uses “transducers, elastic ropes, and other objects (foil, paper…)” Performed in an alley outside a venue, the resulting first track is replete with high, squeaky tones, punctuated by the random knocks and spurts of unidentified objects. The second piece literally uses amplified balloons devised by Cong, which the three attack and manipulate to create a busy field of rattling, rumbling noise. Both tracks feel both minimalist and confrontational, as Song, Cong, and Wenbo play thoughtfully and wildly at the same time.
Spanyurd & Zumigalooje
SPLIT ENDS
Cassette,
I somehow never heard about the Chicago noise-rock outfit Spanyurd during their run in the ’00s and ’10s, but their four tracks on this split release make me wish I had. Slotting in well with some of the best noise rock of that time and place (specifically Weasel Walter-involved groups like Flying Luttenbachers and Lake of Dracula), the trio of guitarist Ethan Hughes, bassist Randy Remolusso, and drummer Tom Bradach bring lots of dissonance and heaviness to their crashing sound, rarely letting up on the gas despite the pure exhaustion that playing like this must produce. Around 2019, the three got reunited, and found the music had evolved enough to give the group a new name: Zumigalooje. Their share of this split tape leans less on heavy noise and more on a kind of manic, funk-tinged energy, propelled by Bradach’s enthused pounding. It’s a shame this version also didn’t last, but SPLIT ENDS is a worthy document of what these three musicians achieved.
Tugo
Noise After Work
I’m not sure who is behind Tugo (which, according to the artist, “is a Russian word meaning ‘tightly'”) but apparently they crafted Noise After Work in the literal situation of its title, i.e., “in the evenings after office work for a couple of weeks…[as] an expression of abstract anger at the corporate office culture.” The album’s 13 untitled tracks certainly seethe with dissonance, enough to make you feel the earned rage of unsatisfying employment. But there’s more than just animosity here; some of the pieces explore echo, rhythm, and even little shards of melody, while others feel less like human emotion than broken down machines rising against their makers. Whatever scenarios it conjures, Noise After Work is a great way to spend some free time.
Otomo Yoshihide
Hummingbird and Four Flowers: Turntable and Harmonium Solo Live
Compact Disc (CD)
In 2022, experimental turntable pioneer Otomo Yoshihide performed two sets as part of an anniversary celebration of the Ftarri music store in Tokyo. He had planned to use just turntables, but noticed a harmonium in the shop and grabbed it during his first set. Playing it at the outset and returning to it at the end, Yoshihide constructed a 30-minute piece filled with clanging noise, thick silences, and high-pitched tones that feel almost inhuman. For his next piece, he stuck to the turntable, delivering similar moods but finding new sounds and ideas yet again. Part of Yoshihide’s brilliance with turntables has to be seen to be believed, but Hummingbird and Four Flowers comes as close as possible at capturing it for those who couldn’t be there.
