Welcome to the year-end edition of Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp, in which we’ve picked 13 of our favorites from 2023. Once again, the scope and impact of experimental music on the site widened and deepened, with more and more artists soaring past the boundaries of genre, convention, and definition. Presented in alphabetical order by artist, our selections include mysterious free improvisation, weaponized bass clarinet, solo guitar extrapolations, music made with cardboard boxes, and a moving document of the beginning of a 50-year romantic partnership.
河边走 The river, Orchestration, Walkman!
Trio
Cassette
This mysterious Chinese three-piece band consisting of members named Jin, Junchen, and Pongpong released Trio on the very first day of 2023, and it still sounds as strange and mysterious as it did then. Diving into reckless, free-improv jazz-rock, the group melts skronky, wiry sounds into larger drones, sometimes sounding like a doom metal band playing underwater. But then there’s also the closer “Bolero Night,” a bounding stomp that evokes a Tom Waits hook repeated until everything falls apart.
Ruth Anderson & Annea Lockwood
Tête-à-tête
Vinyl
Annea Lockwood and the late Ruth Anderson are two ground-breaking composers who also happened to have a 50-year romantic partnership. Tête-à-tête opens with Anderson’s final work, “Resolutions,” and closes with Lockwood’s tribute to Anderson, “For Ruth,” made after Anderson’s passing in 2019. Both pieces are moving, but nothing can match the joy and beauty of the album’s centerpiece, Anderson’s “Conversations.” Composed primarily of phone calls between the two that Anderson recorded at the beginning of their relationship, it’s filled with laughter, curiosity, and excitement, revealing this extraordinary relationship as its own work of art.
Серб і Молодь
Безкоштовний Джаз
This live recording of an enigmatic Ukrainian group has the air of a basement jam with friends and freaks in attendance rooting the band on as they skirt the edges of improv-rock groups like Boredoms, No-Neck Blues Band, and Fat Worm of Error. When Серб і Молодь aren’t deconstructing rock tropes—grinding out off-beats and strangling chords—they’re falling face-first into dirty jazz flames that they somehow fuel and douse, creating something both unpredictable and fun.
Cop Funeral
Jake
Cassette, Compact Disc (CD), T-Shirt/Shirt
Joshua Tabbia, who records as Cop Funeral, knows his way around a loop. The 11 pieces on Jake all feature repetitive cycles of some sort, and around them Tabbia gathers up sounds that attach, build, and launch, maintaining the central hypnosis of his repetitions even as he’s creating wordless narratives with his evolving noises. The music that arises from his manipulations is both soothing and harrowing; you can either zone out to his loops or let them creep up your skin. But why not do both? Jake will keep your attention either way.
Amy Cutler
Sister Time
Cassette
Over 24 tracks lasting 69 minutes, Amy Cutler doles out echoing sounds that seem to release ghosts from their graves. Some of those ghosts are of Cutler herself: she samples mixtapes she made as a kid in the ‘90s on her stereo, melting these snippets under thick atmospheres. On “sad and unfinished (the swirl of the wind),” pop songs are warped until they resemble something subconscious; during “i’ll be that man,” a torch song crooner slowly drowns in reverberations; and on “wolf tape,” human voices blur into what feel like memories in your head, too ravaged by time to be more than a vibration. The result is bizarrely playful and deadly serious, like a dream edging on a nightmare.
Madison Greenstone
Resonance Studies in Ecstatic Consciousness
Compact Disc (CD)
Madison Greenstone uses the bass clarinet as a weapon. On Resonance Studies in Ecstatic Consciousness, their instrument pierces the air like a missile bisecting a cloud. Shrieks and honks spark away on “Aelion Harp I,” while on “Glass Horn (Acoustic Shadows)” a high-pitched drone freezes the air around it. Each of the 11 tracks is relatively short, giving Greenstone a chance to explore many timbres and moods; every piece feels like a chapter in a perfectly paced page turner.
Christian Mirande
Beautiful One Day, Perfect the Next
Vinyl LP
Christian Mirande is an expert at arranging natural sounds into narratives that reflect a heightened version of reality. Beautiful One Day, Perfect the Next also has moments that are conventionally musical, particularly the jazz-leaning piece that takes up all of side two. Yet the external world drives it all, with field recordings and speech playing large roles. “Interlude: Can’t Close My Hand In This Dream” feels like a scan of dead radio stations, while “Conclusion: LTV” plays like an audio diary, one that compels you to find something new in it with each listen.
Lexie Mountain
I Am Here To Win One Million Dollars
Cassette
Mixed together over the course of several years, Lexie Mountain’s I Am Here To Win One Million Dollars feels like a milestone. All the collaged source material—live tapes, field recordings, voice experiments—possesses true gravity, with Mountain’s voice swimming in a sea of circling noises and looped cacophony. The music is often meditative, as if these are rituals by which Mountain can reach an abstract plane. But there’s also concrete action coursing through the album, some of it as funny as it is profound—take “Old Handwriting (I’m Dude),” wherein Mountain sings that parenthetical as passionately as Dolly Parton.
Nonconnah
Unicorn Family
Cassette
Nonconnah recorded Unicorn Family at three different studios and solicited contributions from ten other artists, including Jad Fair of Half Japanese, Alex Greene of Reigning Sound, and Angel Marcloid (Fire-Toolz). Together these bubbling minds create music that drifts from water-damaged campfire folk to Space Age synths to electronic-glitch meditations. Throughout, haunting voices speak in passages that echo both dystopian mind control and profound pastoral verse. But what sticks most with Unicorn Family is the heavy atmospheres, making the whole thing feel like a sonic seance.
Emily Robb
If I Am Misery Then Give Me Affection
Vinyl LP
The oscillating guitar tones that kick off Emily Robb’s If I Am Misery Then Give Me Affection sound like a portent for some massive, dramatic crescendo. But Robb’s solo guitar work doesn’t need to make those kinds of expected moves to compel your attention. She’s confident enough to let ideas play out, whether they’re amp manipulations, chord wranglings, or Hendrix-style solos. Anything goes on the nine tracks here, but Robb’s in control, sawing and swinging through notes and noises like a chef chopping and blending flaming food before your eyes.
Tongue Depressor
Bones For Time
2 x Vinyl LP
Zach Rowden and Henry Birdsey of Tongue Depressor have been super busy both together and apart the last few years, but Bones For Time is perhaps the definitive Tongue Depressor statement. Here the duo offer four 18-minute tracks of drone, noise, psych, and ambience, all generated from bass, tapes, guitar, cello, harmonium, and bagpipes. Held tones have always been a core element of their music, but here such sounds also get stretched, mangled, and manipulated into something nearly ineffable.
Taku Unami
bot box boxes
Compact Disc (CD)
After working for years on a new release, Taku Unami had a burst of creativity, recording three long pieces in just 16 hours. The result, the triple CD bot box boxes presents exactly what Unami made that day, without edits or overdubs. The title is literal: one piece was made with robots, another with a box, and the final with multiple boxes. Each depicts Unami’s constant, energetic play with his chosen objects, and eventually all three become surrealist soundscapes, melting the blunt reality of the objects into pure, joyous sound.
Matt Weston
Embrace This Twilight
2 x Vinyl LP
The prolific percussionist and sound artist Matt Weston makes one of his most forceful statements on the double album Embrace This Twilight. Across four pieces that each take up an LP side, Weston launches headfirst into attention-grabbing sounds and rarely lets his foot off the pedal. There is a lot of variety throughout, from heavy drum hits to massive drones to chopped up electronics to glossolalia-style voice samples. Particularly impressive is “The Sky Over Petrograd,” a 15-minute cloud of repetition, noise, and churn that’s sure to spin heads.
