"I just make stuff until it sounds right," said Norwegian experimental musician Gaute Granli in a 2021 interview, when asked about his creative intentions. His answer is both evasive-what would it mean, when crafting deliberately confrontational art, to release something you think sounds wrong?-and an accurate description of a practice shaped by enigmatic instincts. Granli's curious new album Rosacea has a nebulous atmosphere all its own.
FRI/30-SUN/1: PIVOT FESTIVAL The 11th annual installment of this incredible boundary-pushing music festival has enlisted Andy Meyerson of the excellent Living Earth Show duo to curate-and boy is he bringing it. (If you haven't grokked Living Earth's terrific Roar Shack venue, hop to it, btw.) The weekend fills Herbst Theater with hyper-San Franciscan sounds, with performances by vocalist Tanner Porter, San Francisco Ballet dancer- choreographer Myles Thatcher, and Bay Area ensembles Bucket List (featuring composer-creator Mark Applebaum),
In March 2025, the UK experimental music scene was pleasantly surprised when London venue Cafe Oto got a mention at the Oscars. Daniel Blumberg, who won an Oscar for the score for The Brutalist, used his acceptance speech to pay tribute to the East London venue and its community of "hard working, radical musicians, who've been making uncompromising music for many years" (the soundtrack features the likes of Seymour Wright, Evan Parker and Steve Noble).
Friends After Good Sound are a newcomer to Portland's experimental music scene. They are a collective of young, queer composers and performers that exclusively play works composed for them by Portland-based composers. Their approach to music has a gaiety and a wicked sense of humor. Hence their name, which abbreviates to a reclaimed slur for queer people. The name is clearly meant to ruffle some feathers, acting as a shibboleth separating the gays and their allies
Ivo Dimchev, the provocative Bulgarian performance artist, choreographer, and musician, is celebrated as an "enfant terrible." His performances are an electrifying blend of physicality and genre-defying artistry, daringly delving into the complexities of sex, power, and desire. With a captivating mix of vocals, dramatic expressions, and striking staging, Dimchev pushes the limits of artistic expression, leaving audiences both dazzled and entranced.
By that, I meant work that doesn't seek to explain itself, not out of a pretentious desire to keep people out but more out of an inner intensity, a desire to enmesh you within its concept-world by experience rather than sitting and pointing and lecturing about any given thing in the book. Music, it turns out, is the best way to make this clear; songs, especially truly great ones, don't explain their emotional character to you but instead make you feel it.
On July 7, 2025, Lucrecia Dalt's heart stopped. She had suffered a severe epileptic seizure, and eight seconds would pass before it resumed beating. The next day, the Colombian musician released " caes," the third single from her breathtaking new album A Danger to Ourselves -a song that suggests, she says, "that the sublime can be reached through surrendering to the act of falling." For two days after her near-death experience, she soared, so overwhelmed by the beauty of her surroundings that she wondered if she had actually died and was experiencing the afterlife. She hadn't, of course, and the world that wowed her was the same one she occupied before her heart had stopped. She had just surrendered to the fall.
The evening began as the audience filled their seats, a DJ booth with glowing, orange lights visible in the darkness. A dark, shadowy figure appeared behind white fabric hung across the stage. As music created by the live DJ sounded, the figure moved a glowing orb. It played with depth of shadow until morphing into two distinct figures. The delicate electronica soundscape matched the dark whimsy of the scene, indicating a moist forest atmosphere.
"What they heard when they put the new album on their turntables was nothing, absolutely nothing but screaming feedback noise recorded at various frequencies, played back against various other noise layers."
The String Queens challenge the norm by blending classical, contemporary, and experimental styles, highlighting womenâs empowerment in a male-dominated music landscape.
