The 10 Best Experimental Albums Of 2024
Once again, here are my personal picks for the year’s best in drone slabs, free improv hangouts, android piano music, psychedelic noise tapes, footwoork jazz, field recording jams and more. That’s that me transgresso.
I’m an absolute sucker for musicians that hyperextend the technique of their instruments well beyond the point of intention and sanity. Spain’s Carme López turns the Galician bagpipe into a heaving, gurgling alien — seriously, this thing sounds like a Lovecraftian horror about to get up and walk around. Fingers bubble percussively on sound holes, reeds sound like they are being plucked like an mbira, and one of the most iconic drone instruments is forced to honk out impressionistic squeals.
Aughts scuzz-psych mutants Yellow Swans sloshed back up after 15 years of inactivity, playing a handful of shows in 2023. The Out Of Practice I cassette documents their ooey-gooey re-emergence with two versions of the same piece. The first is not totally removed from the gauzy noizegaze of their 2010 landmark Going Places with hints of midwest scum-tape clankery and the forgotten memories (of the forgotten memories) of vaporwave. The B-side, a live version from Oblivion Fest, is a mushier, almost power electronics tantrum that blows it out to, well, oblivion. The lithe follow-up tape, Out Of Practice II, features them making swampy, smeary chaos by putting forcing Roky Erickson and Suicide cassettes to traverse their hall of mirrors.
XT is a London sax-and-drums duo that seems more obsessed with cosmetically modifying their instruments with whacked-out electronics than doing Ascension-style rave-ups. Kavain Wayne Space is footwork pioneer RP Boo whose Godzilla-inspired tracks gave the genre menace and majesty. Together, in this 30-minute sparring match at London’s storied Cafe Oto, they stutter and rumble like a Discman falling down concrete steps. Just like the dissonance of footwork musics triplets-on-eighth-notes pattens, there is an intriguing antagonism between Boo’s funky pad-work and XT’s splattery free-fall.
The debut album from Los Angeles composer Tashi Wada moves with dream logic: The sheer amount of ideas here is stunning. A tiny shrapnel of pastoral indie rock quickly dissolves into a beatless fog punctuated with harpsichord pointillism, nocturnal field recordings accompany mysterious squonk, keyboard improv bumps up against Julia Holter’s ASMR whisper. There’s ecstatic free improv, drone pieces that spiral and distend, nostalgic synth patches and lots of improvising around a tonic note. Wada throws everything against the wall and, somehow, it all sticks.
This gorgeous, zero-gravity record comes courtesy of Australia sound art lifer Lawrence English and Japanese pianist Akira Kosemura, a collaboration that is ostensibly “ambient” music, but just as easily could be filed away as slow-dripping modern composition or an imaginary film soundtrack. Incredibly high in drama and movement, there’s echoes of Max Richter, Ryuichi Sakomoto, Tangerine Dream, and David Lynch in its expansive, drifting spacescapes.
For this ominous-yet-animated suite of static, Berlin-via-Nairobi sound artist KMRU uses electromagnetic microphones to reflect the invisible signals of city life. This means steady hums are swarmed with high-frequency chirps, crackling prickles twitch nervously like the flitting off exposed wires and the supposed pulses of life come in and out of focus.
Chicago cellist/composer Lia Kohl is the Marcel Duchamp of improv, taking the most quotidian of sounds — the entomological buzz of a light on a tennis court, the staccato squeak of sneakers across a floor — and putting a frame on them with lush synth drone and stately string spirals. Ka Baird plays flute alongside a car alarm, Patrick Shiroishi’s saxophone has a deliberate conversation with some honking autos, and a shimmering piece of new age replaces the requisite birdsong with a self-checkout machine.
This free-rock supergroup — stoner-Fahey psychonaut Steve Gunn, exploratory Dirty Three drummer Jim White, improv jack-of-all-trades Shahzad Ismaily, and pyrotechnic jazz saxophonist Zoh Amba — does a pretty good Spacemen 3 and an even better Velvet Underground & Nico. However, the best moments on their debut experiment, There Is A Garden, are simply getting together to make beautiful racket. Amba’s transcendent soloing runs against the grain of space rock (“Flowers That Talk”), White clamors to restore order in a dissonant drone traffic jam (“God Dances in Your Eyes”), a 64-second Pussy Galore-gone-Naked City jazz-punk song stomps in a back alley (“In The Garden”), and some good old-fashioned four-person skronk makes transcendental clatter (“Face Of Silence”)
This year, I commissioned an original piece from New York outré-pianist Kelly Moran for my white noise app, so it’s not exactly some secret that I’m a fan. Her second album for Warp, Moves In The Field, eschews the rattly, buzzy, wounded prepared piano and gulping electronics that made 2018’s Ultraviolet a kaleidoscope of textures. Instead, she programmed glistening robo-minimalist arpeggios and breakneck runs into a Yamaha Disklavier and added her gentle countermelodies, painting prismatic rainbows onto a piano that’s diligently making waterfalls by itself. The effect is like Conlon Nancarrow and Erik Satie jamming, side by side, on the same bench. This blustery conversation between human and machine erupts with overtones, feeling like a high-octane modern classical flurry and placid ambient journey all at once.
You can read a more measured opinion on Rafael Toral in my year-end blurb for Pitchfork, so I’ll indulge in something a little bloggier here: What the fuck even is this thing? The narrative went that Rafael Toral, best known for four gushing guitar-drone albums released between 1994 and 2001, was returning to the six-string, an underground icon reclaiming to his roots in a world where the EBow has basically replaced the guitar pick for any solo dude with an 8:30 opening slot. Spectral Evolution starts with some plaintive pluck and some squonking feedback fuckery and then, about 90 seconds in, the whole mess eases into the type of warm, sentimental jazz chords you’d expect from George Gershwin. A 47-minute journey, it travels woozily through enveloping drone, glacial solos, and chattering jazz that sounds like toy robots bumping into each other. Which brings me to my original question: What the fuck even is this thing? Electroacoustic free-jazz? Tin pan alley ambient? Spontaneous shoegaze? FDR-era EAI?
Top 5 Deeply Experimental, But Still Technically “Rock” Records That Probably Could Have Made the List Had I Decided Not to Be a Stickler About It
5. Hyper Gal – After Image (Skin Graft)
4. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” (Constellation)
3. Still House Plants – If I Don’t Make It, I Love U (Bison)
2. Sumac – The Healer (Thrill Jockey)
1. Cuntroaches – Cuntroaches (Skin Graft)
Honorable Mentions
Olivia Block – The Mountains Pass (Black Truffle)
Sarah Davachi – The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir (Late Music)
Nadah El Shazly & Elvin Brandhi – Pollution Opera (Danse Noire)
Jessica Ekomane/Laurel Halo – Manifolds/Octavia (Portraits GRM)
Sarah Hennies – Motor Tapes (New World)
Chuck Johnson – Sun Glories (Western Vinyl)
Dave Harrington, Max Jaffe, Patrick Shiroishi – Speak, Moment (APK)
Maria W Horn – Panoptikon (XKatedral)
Jlin – Akoma (Planet Mu)
Sunik Kim – Tears Of Rage (Rope)
Carme Lopez – Quintela (Warm Winters Ltd.)
Kali Malone – All Life Long (Ideologic Organ)
Nídia & Valentina – Estradas (Latency)
Pyur – Lucid Anarchy (Subtext)
Sunny Five – Candid (Intakt)
