Avant Garde Music

Discover 88 avant garde releases with free Bandcamp download codes from independent artists and labels.

VII

Withered souls and music boxes Boxes of atonement and liquefied souls Crank-operated hypnagogia and souls declared missing Canned music and white noise The night offers no counsel. It stands motionless. Watching us. Without uttering a single word. -Sir Kuliktavikt

UgUrGkuliktavikt y El Zombie Espacial

Imagine: the soundtrack to a completely obscure 1972 arthouse-gore-experimental-surrealist horror film, the only surviving copy of which was unearthed from a particularly damp basement... The unfinished film features psychedelic grass snakes composed of 35% tender, juicy pineapple and 189% opaque fog. There is also a butcher boy with sewn-shut eyes who goes chop-chop-chop on his victims while riding a unicycle. The sky is mean. It has mouths and millions of teeth. It eats people and veiny plants. Its gaze melts mutant snails. Meanwhile, Viscount Kuliktavikt and his zombified companion are having a merry little picnic on an Earth emptied of humanity, savouring their human eyeball ceviche drizzled with aqueous humour, accompanied by some delicious dill pickle chips... all while hyenas squabble over the remaining chunks of flesh in a park that groans and groans and groans in pain... and pleasure, during the last saffron-flavoured night of existence, all drenched in clammy electricity and absolute perdition.

Russell's Teapot

On Global Echo

Russell's Teapot's contribution to ECHØVEIL's Halloween-esque first anniversary is a little marvel of surreal, distorted dark ambient. A nightmare within a dream within yet another nightmare, unfolding inside the opiate-addled mind of a dying man, injected with a cocktail of synthetic substances as his derailing consciousness hallucinates multiple psychotic / psychedelic incarnations of Hell... An unreal track that slowly carves its own shadowy path beneath a cold metallic shower of austere field recordings, rancid proto-witch house, and dark ambient (with a heavy emphasis on the DARK here), all reeking of freshly deceased flesh. The maggot-spawning worms have only just begun their work on the still-warm carcass. -Sir Kuliktavikt

Justin A. Mank & Rumonoise

Justin A. Mank / Rumonoise

The kind of split that was MADE for ECHØVEIL. Uncompromising music. Music that goes all the way, pushing beyond the limits of sound, noise, deconstruction, and the avant-garde. Justin A. Mank and his dismantled, reassembled processed doumbek, transformed into a most peculiar and delicious post-free-anti-jazz-noise-hypnotic mantra. Rumonoise and his crushing, voracious walls of sound, splashed with a thousand schizoid colours, where worlds implode against one another, harvesting the sap of eschatological sparks. This is joy. Thank you, gentlemen, for bestowing dreams upon the impossible. -Sir Kuliktavikt

The Metamorph

Entr'acte LSTSF

1 track album

existent/nonexistent

I Can't Stop the Bleeding

The darkness is absolute. Except for the spiders. The spiders are glowing. A faint, sickly, psychotropic phosphorescence emanates from their hairy bodies. Psychedelic arachnid lanterns. Lovely. They have mandibles. They are hungry. They look at you with their cold, stupid, utterly indifferent little eyes. You attempt to flee. Unfortunately, your foot lands on a slug the size of a small dog. The creature lets out a tiny squeal of ecstasy as its swollen body ruptures, emptying its juices, its black blood, its entire miserable inventory of internal fluids across the basement floor. You fall. The spiders approach. They enter your mouth. They lick. They tear. They burrow. They make their way through the soft, pink architecture of your increasingly irrelevant anatomy. One of them has found a particularly comfortable little cavity behind your left eye.

Álvaro Pérez & Álvaro Domene

ZODOS 2

On “Zodos Vol.2”, Madrid based alto saxophonist-composer Álvaro Pérez and New York based guitarist-composer Álvaro Domene present six new original pieces of exploratory creative music for alto saxophone and seven string electric guitar which delve into and beyond the wide spectrum of functions and textures that these two instruments can adopt individually and with each other. On this second volume, their chamber-like compositional structures feature faster tempi, hockets, and elements of unison, both rhythmic and melodic, which take priority in place of the more abstract and textural passages from the first release. The duo brings virtuosity to the sensitive requirements of this remarkably labyrinthine music, which calls for deep instrumental dexterity and an acute awareness for leveling out all of the components of their language to generate a singular aural result that, often times, feels as if it had a three-dimensional tactile element to it. The six pieces that form the second volume of "Zodos" reveal two performers in peak form, each of whom displays his abilities to the fullest, at the vanguard of repertoire development for this particular instrumentation.

Sebastian Tomb

The Grudge That Refused To Wane While The World Kept Clapping

A new Sebastian Tomb release is always an event in itself. The Berlin artist continues to quietly trace his own path through an obtuse, obsessive discography, wandering the fogbound limbo of a droning, spellbound harsh noise wall whose peculiar alchemy seems to belong to him alone. Silent cinema. Film noir. Enchanting pin-ups glimpsed through cigarette smoke. Celluloid sweating ghosts beneath a dead projector’s light... To rub one’s senses against these sonic surfaces—simultaneously velvety and abrasive—is a pleasure endlessly renewed. ST’s music is a hypnagogic wall that catches you softly, insidiously, entirely. Its static settles upon the grey matter like a dissolving tablet of ecstasy, delirium and loss... until listening becomes less an act than a state of disappearance. This new four-track EP might be one of our comrade’s most narcotic excursions yet. Four enigmas, one after another. Four rooms behind four doors that perhaps were never there. Each one pulling you further into the unreal, into oblivion, into the slow forgetting of everything, including yourself. A journey to the end of the night. The 1920s returning as a ghost in a state of pure sedative noise and low, rumbling drone. -Sir Kuliktavikt

Paranoised

X

Paranoised returns. With X. Whatever X is. Once again, the mysterious entity drifts through its own peculiar strain of textured, psychedelic, surrealist avant-noise—electronically decalibrated, contaminated by musique concrète, proto-industrial machinery and some primitive/primordial form of electroacoustic sorcery. An album you dream as much as you listen to. Like wandering through the forests surrounding Chernobyl with a dosimeter in one hand and some obsolete recording apparatus in the other—capturing, recording, re-recording, re-re-recording, reshaping every invisible particle of information received, conjuring it into immortality, tangling the data into an austere mechanical tango of rust, static and irradiated electricity. The song of wounded machines. Penumbra. Light. Shadow. A clearing of molten metal. Ghost in the machine. Something is boiling underneath it all. Telluric chemical reactions inside the cauldron. A thousand cosmic detonations. Corrupted signals breeding with corrupted signals. Antimatter rendered into sonic perdition, bubbling, mutating, refusing to settle into any recognizable shape. And somewhere behind all this— the architect of inhuman vertigo, quietly contemplating its creature: deformed, splendid, evasive, alive. Yeah. It’s Paranoised. Uncatchable, as it should be.

Angel B.

Self-Portrait

I love. I love. I love. The song of the exterminating angel. Shattered concrete, rusted sheet metal, melting steel, poisonous lichen coiling itself around the entrails of the world-machine. It is a bloodless cathedral. A cathedral of molten lava, spit of liquefied mortar, ferrous tears, glass venom, leaden fractures. A cathedral that dies and comes back to life with every passing second. Destruction-construction-destruction-re-re-con-construction. A work of rage. Personal. Timeless. Fragile as a flower. And yet indestructible as a mountain range. To rise only to collapse more magnificently, in a Dionysian gesture of self-abasement. The art of wandering worlds that live fast and inter-die. The absolute precision of sound becoming an instantaneous supernova. I dreamed of flying hyenas, half-biological, half-robotic. Cosmic leeches were crawling out of their reddened eyes. I saw the shattered stained-glass windows, fragments suspended for eternity in a slow-motion dance, defying all gravity. Warheads flavored with perdition. Those knobs we turn, one after another, desperately trying to give meaning, however violent that meaning may be, to what is ultimately nothing but unreason. Self-Portrait. The record that best describes human existence in 2026. An absolute masterpiece. Thank you. -Sir Kuliktavikt

Álvaro Pérez & Álvaro Domene

ZODOS 3

Here on ZODOS 3, the two Álvaros are creating startlingly excellent musical constructions and personal expressions that are a new branch of the tree of Fractal math used conceptual seeds in musics. I’ve always let Fractal math guide me in improvisations, so it’s something I know and recognize. The two gentlemen on ZODOS 3 have found many new ways to advance these methodologies. It’s obvious to see the references in the titles of the album’s pieces. But as one who has “seen the elephant”, the music here is truly ground-breaking, elegant and as expressive as only the best improvisations can be. Without getting too technical and specific, Domene’s use of pedals and digital processing is not just at the cutting edge of guitar-slinging. Still, it’s also at the cutting edge of real-time creation of improvised and complex musical structures that could only exist through his advanced and innovative use of exotic delay pedals. I believe that the two Álvaros also developed novel recording and arrangement strategies that reflect the musical structures that come from both their brains and the serendipity of the delays. I could teach a weekend workshop by just listening to this album. And it’s not just abstract musical intellectualism. One of my heroes, Ali Akbar Khan, once told me that music is food for the soul and spirit. I especially find this sort of nourishment in listening to this record. We live in a Fractal World - read up on Fractals in nature and especially coastlines. See if you then hear some of that in this excellent music. And then, the music can open the door to new ways to experience the Universe around you." Henry Kaiser. December 31, 2022 All music by Álvaro Domene [seven string electric guitar] and Álvaro Pérez [alto saxophone].

Álvaro Domene

HEPTAD III

Here is the third volume of the HEPTAD book of compositions for seven string electric guitar by Álvaro Domene. Liner notes by Elliott Sharp: "Crystalline complexity sings in the third volume of Heptad, a new collection of solo pieces by Álvaro Domene for guitar and electronics. There's a subtle swing that shines throughout placing this music within the realm of jazz without ever falling prey to the cliches. Álvaro's style is very much his own yet we may hear hints of John Abercrombie, Anthony Braxton, and Thelonious Monk not to mention the intensity and virtuosity of Cecil Taylor or the mathematical bluesiness of Conlon Nancarrow's pieces for player piano. The sound is always clear and articulate yet warm - the use of electronics never renders the music cold nor clinical. Indeed, the effects vault the playing into the realm of the impossible with delays and pitch shifters being used not for Hollywood-style effects but to extend the range of Álvaro's instrument into deep bass and stratospheric treble while creating contrapuntal lines that swirl into fractal wisps. In addition to waves of notes, there are placid pools of harmonic stillness, all the better to frame the sonic maelstrom. Heptad offers the surprises of improvisation seamlessly combined with the satisfying arc of well-constructed compositions." - Elliott Sharp, November 2022. Make sure you listen to the first and second volumes to experience the evolution of the Heptad sound and syntax: Volume I: ilusorecords.bandcamp.com/album/heptad Volume II: ilusorecords.bandcamp.com/album/heptad-volume-ii Credits Released December 2, 2022 Álvaro Domene: compositions, seven string electric guitar, audio engineering, and artwork. No overdubs. Published by Dometone Music BMI alvarodomene.com

Álvaro Domene

HEPTAD I

"Heptad is stunning! Vivid, rich in sound and emotion, and packed with ideas." - Elliott Sharp “‘Heptad: Volume 1’ captures Álvaro in real-time performance mode. As he describes it, the pieces are composed and notated and then spontaneously interpreted for this album. All processing happens in the moment, with custom-programmed pitch delay algorithms that influence the final output. Its seven pieces reflect a diversity of approaches. Pulsing, percussive, ambient, ethereal, disquieting and lacerating are just a handful of words that reflect what you’ll hear.” – Anil Prasad (Innerviews.org) "Domene’s latest solo effort retains the extended range of his 7-string electric but favors a cleaner sound than usual. Also retained is his excellent sense of dynamics and compositional arc." - Michael Ross (guitarmoderne.com) "The second track "Attrition" is a great example of this during its nine-minute run. Essentially a suite, the track begins with a pulsating drive and sparkling reversed envelopes of sound, a pause leads to a more atmospheric second with spacious ringing tones and interesting counter motions, which split multi-directionally, but at times coalesce into driving rhythmic figures. Another track, 'Where The Universe Is Set On Cold Fire' sounds like a self-aware Theremin singing of a broken heart. Fascinating. The album is replete with inventiveness. Bring on Vol 2!" - Paul Acquaro (freejazzblog.org)

Álvaro Domene

HEPTAD II

Here is the second volume of Álvaro Domene's HEPTAD project and book of compositions for solo seven string electric guitar and live electronics. Expanding upon the compositional and aesthetic concepts developed for the first volume, these 7 pieces tend to have a more percussive and aggressive sound, with a focus on asymmetrical rhythmic activity and melodic multi-directionality. If the first release took sonic inspiration from avant garde string quartet music, this second release, at times, almost sounds as if two wild pianists were functioning in a duo setting. Still, it's all interpreted on a seven string electric guitar with meticulously programmed pitch delay algorithms that assisted Domene in shaping the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic palette of each composition. Heptad Volume II is one more remarkable accomplishment by a composer and instrumentalist who keeps showing us how different an electric guitar still can sound in today's world. Play loud, enjoy, and also make sure that you listen to the first volume, in case you missed it: ilusorecords.bandcamp.com/album/heptad "Heptad is stunning! Vivid, rich in sound and emotion, and packed with ideas." - Elliott Sharp credits released September 24, 2021 Álvaro Domene: compositions, seven string electric guitar, audio engineering, and artwork. Published by Dometone Music BMI 2021 www.alvarodomene.com

MH & where i lost my hope

motthumatoidathaytruocday

4 track album - WFWM #0125 MH: https://mhmhmh.bandcamp.com https://www.instagram.com/mhmakemusic https://www.youtube.com/@musicbymh where i lost my hope: N/A

Álvaro Pérez

For Three Altos

Madrid-based saxophonist-composer and martial artist Álvaro Pérez's long-awaited debut solo album, "For Three Altos," represents a profound and mature expedition into the depths of his musical brilliance. In each composition, Pérez employs three recorded tracks featuring himself on the alto saxophone, naturally infusing the music with an authentic sensibility shaped by the rich traditions of contemporary European classical music and chamber jazz. Throughout this musical journey, Pérez, also a triple national Kung Fu champion of Spain, embarks on an extensive exploration of compositional and improvisatory principles and strategies inspired by his martial arts praxis with a prominent focus on the art of three-part counterpoint as a particularly exceptional facet of his exploration. The ultimate result of this endeavor is a captivating ride that thoroughly entrances the audience from beginning to end, leaving room for nothing but sheer fascination. The album's standout feature is Álvaro’s extraordinary ability to generate and interlace an extensive array of continually evolving motifs within his compositions. In "For Three Altos,” Álvaro Pérez demonstrates an astounding aptitude for elevating and broadening the scope of saxophone-centered music, all the while pushing the conventional limits found within the realms of both jazz and classical music. His talent has culminated in the creation of a musical masterpiece that, in our opinion, is primed to make a lasting impression on the lineage of saxophone repertoire, contemporary composition and chamber jazz. The eager anticipation that preceded the album has unquestionably been validated, and the patience exercised in awaiting its arrival has been definitely rewarded. What a remarkable debut! - Iluso Records, September 2023. Álvaro Pérez: alto saxophone, compositions, and recording [March 2022 in Madrid] Mixed/Mastered by Álvaro Domene at Singularity Studio [Kingston, New York] Cover art by Ed Keller

Hemwick

Somehow I feel I'm not supposed to leave this place...

Silent Hill. Its dying streets misplaced beneath a poisonous fog. Derelict buildings breathing through broken windows. Empty rooms that somehow remember who suffered inside them. Rust. Dampness. Fluorescent lights trembling themselves toward extinction. Something dragging itself behind a wall. And beneath all of it: the unbearable suspicion that the town knows you. That it has been waiting. A purgatory built not from bricks but from trauma, guilt, repression, depression, unspeakable fears—the soft internal catastrophes we bury deep enough to pretend they have stopped moving. A kind of Lovecraftian Solaris, perhaps, reshaping itself around the wounds of whoever wanders too far inside. Its post-human abominations crawl from this psychic architecture like Francis Bacon figures somehow taught to breathe. With Somehow I feel I'm not supposed to leave this place..., Hemwick does not merely pay tribute to this universe. He extends it. Another condemned corridor has appeared where there wasn't one before. The album is magnificently desolate: feverish, frozen, deconstructed, deeply wrong. Antiquated dark ambient wanders through carbonized death-industrial machinery; grief-stricken drones dissolve into spectral lo-fi electronics; distant metallic convulsions, diseased frequencies and glacial sound-effects emerge and disappear like things glimpsed through fog that perhaps should not be approached. Everything feels abandoned. Everything feels inhabited. A deliciously hideous work of sonic macabre—music for wandering through places that construct themselves from memories you were never supposed to recover. And somewhere, impossibly far behind you, a door has closed. You don't remember opening it. -Sir Kuliktavikt

Everyday Dust

Overtones

Overtones is a long form musique concrète piece exploring the boundaries of sound manipulation using only the resonances, tones, and textures of a 200 year old handbell.

ADAPAR

"Thirty-five minutes of unfettered brutality." - Andrey Henkin, Brooklyn Rail (brooklynrail.org/2023/02/music/Blood-Brothers) "Álvaro Domene and Álvaro Pérez are two musicians that I highly regard and respect. They’ve released incredible music, time and time again. Previously, the two released Zodos and Radical Accretion, but now they’re back with a new project: Adapar. This project takes the furious improvisations the two are known for and digitizes them along with electronic instruments and production; a new sort of jazzgrind rarely seen before. It’s not something you’d want to put during a dinner with some friends, unless they have been thoroughly and expressly forewarned of the incoming intrusion. But, I’m encouraging you to listen to it for yourself first and foremost." - Dave Tremblay

Catatonic Effigy (Domene/Marston/Caratti)

Putrid Tendency

Álvaro Domene: seven string electric guitar and electronics Colin Marston: six string electric bass and synths Mike Caratti: drums and percussion "Catatonic Effigy’s debut album is a powerful and effective attempt at inhabiting the zones between extreme metal, free jazz, and modern composition. The combination of the density of metal and the rhythmic looseness of jazz is breathtaking. One of the most exciting additions to the post-metal canon in years." - Phil Freeman (Wire) "A sonic Frankenstein’s monster with a body of ear-splitting riffs, tectonic bass & drum detonations, and drifting electronics—simultaneously majestic and terrifying." Antonio Poscic (Angry Metal Guy) "Three of the best minds that avant-garde music has to offer."- Spyros Stasis (Pop Matters) "Listen to this album loud – not just because it rocks, but for the detail. You won’t be disappointed." - Mike Borella (Avant Music News)

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