BEST EXPERIMENTAL The Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp, September 2025 By Marc Masters · October 08, 2025
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. Our September selection includes field recordings from Taipei; noise from Italy, Uruguay, and Australia; ref…
BEST EXPERIMENTAL The Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp, September 2025 By Marc Masters · October 08, 2025
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. Our September selection includes field recordings from Taipei; noise from Italy, Uruguay, and Australia; reflections from a Belgian composer on the brink of turning 80; and an impressionist tour of the American South.
Displasia
Italy
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Italy
Italian musicians Francesco Calandrino and Giuseppe Calamia created their duo project Displasia in order to, as they put it, “prevent any possibility of melody.” That doesn’t mean their music is devoid of structure, though; the six pieces on Metacognitivo include at least hints of repeated elements. But it’s part of an unfixed approach where noise means openness to possibility rather than the absence of intention. With Calandrino using saxophone and cassettes, and Calamia employing guitar and electronics, Displasia creates 3-D atmospheres with static, rattles, detonations, and drones. The best tracks, like the sputtering “TI” and the ominous “TA,” sit in between moods, sounding both funny and serious in equal measure.
Annette Vande Gorne
London, UK
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London, UK
Tutti Frutti is a retrospective of sorts from 79-year old Belgian composer Annette Vande Gorne, who presents eight pieces from the years 1983 to 2020. As she puts it in notes to the album, “The aesthetic choice I made at the age of 33 […] has remained steadfast.” That’s clear in this work, which explores, in her words, “Music of Meaning rather than Music of Sound.” So Tutti Frutti may often be abstract, but there’s a force of purpose behind every moment here. Sometimes the intent is clear, as in the Claude Debussy tribute “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Est (after Debussy),” while elsewhere, like the burbling “Crise,” a ping-ponging, stereo-spanning aural collage feels both comical and pointed. There’s a lot of other stuff happening on Tutti Frutti too, but it’s all tied together by Vande Gorne’s relentless exploration of acoustic invention.
Arek Gulbenkoglu/Matthew Revert
Jersey City, New Jersey
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Jersey City, New Jersey
I have little clue what Australian sound artists Arek Gulbenkoglu and Matthew Revert are doing on Independent Television, but I’m really glad they did it. You could maybe call some of it field recording; sections of the most hypnotic track, “What About Security?,” have the hum and clatter of a warehouse. But even that piece is more surreal than real, and all six tracks here live in a liminal space between representation and abstraction. “Certain Materials,” the shortest piece at just over four minutes, sounds like Morse code messaging between underground insects, while “Sacrifice Entertainment” starts as thunderous noise before morphing into hearing-test style whine. Maybe the mystery of the creation here is part of what makes Independent Television great: Each time I listen I imagine the sources of these sounds and the way they were put together differently, and the potential meaning shifts accordingly.
Chloe Yu Nong Lin and P.M. Tummala
Chicago, Illinois
Chicago, Illinois
Back in 2021,Chloe Yu Nong Lin and P.M. Tummala each separately made two of the best experimental releases of the year. Lin’s came in March, while Tummala’s arrived in November, and both were on Tumalla’s label Monastral. It turns out that the year before, during the beginning of the pandemic, the pair recorded a duo session in Chicago, working in adjacent rooms via headphones. The result, Levitation Stories, features Lin on p**ipa (a Chinese lute invented over two millennia ago) and Tummala on harmonium, with both filtering their sounds through patches, pedals, and microphones. There’s a kind of slow motion, horror-film-score feel to Levitation Stories, as if the duo imagined tense scenes and potential jump scares as they generated their thick tones. But there’s also an assured calm to Lin and Tummala’s work, with a clear sense of trust between the two in their trading of ideas and sounds.
mafmadmaf
Guangzhou, China
Guangzhou, China
The China-based artist who goes by the name mafmadmaf seems best known as a graphic designer, but his work reaches into many media, including the sound art contained in his latest cassette release, The Victorian Whale. It’s based on field recordings he made in Hong Kong in 2019; a few years later, he collaborated with artist Jolie Zhilei Zhou to create an accompanying story, illustration, and apparently even a scent. That’s all included in the cassette package, but the audio by itself is entrancing enough, a melding of environmental sound and collaged noise. There are points at which The Victorian Whale feels like public eavesdropping, but the majority is less surface-oriented, as mafmadmaf and Zhou concoct a soundscape that exudes the mystery of a humid fog.
Viciado de Nulidad
Montevideo, Uruguay
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Montevideo, Uruguay
I don’t know anything about the artist(s) behind Viciado de Nulidad, except that they have a sizable discography on Bandcamp. Their latest, Ponzoña, is the first I’ve heard, and it makes me want to dig backwards. Their music is dense and busy, full of rolling, head-forward noise that should keep your neurons firing long past the end of each piece. Some tracks vary their tones, cutting from noise to restraint and back, while some–including my favorite, the 10-minute tidal wave “Gritando que razones seguro habrán” (which translates as “Screaming That There Must Be Reason”)–push the noise full steam ahead. But if you’re worried there’s not enough variety on Ponzoña, check out “Pie de página en la luna” (“Footer on the Moon”), a collage of burbling voices that could either calm you down or haunt you.
Chris Williams
Brooklyn, New York
Brooklyn, New York
It’s hard not to fall into a trance when listening to the latest album by Chris Williams. The New York-based trumpet player and composer fills Odu Vibration II with patient sounds that feel tailor-made to slow down your mind and relax your muscles. But it’s far from easy listening. Williams’s mix of trumpet and synths never rests, with aural events dotted around the stereo space, creating an environment that feels both tangible and oddly unfamiliar. Each track has subtle arcs that sneak up on you; my favorite is the longest: the 14-minute “Stemmed outwards,” in which Williams weaves a ringing tones and field-recording-like noises into a collaboration with his frequent partner, the equally-inventive saxophone player Patrick Shiroishi, creating a kind of an album inside an album that reflects Williams’s larger artistic aims.
Weston Olencki
Berlin, Germany
Berlin, Germany
On one level, Broadsides is Weston Olencki‘s document of his 2023 journey through the American South, where they often stopped to play, record, ruminate on the landscape, and connect with their South Carolina roots. But nothing made by Olencki, who currently lives in Germany, ever exists on just one level. So while “Interlude (Where the Water Did Flow)” is literally Olencki playing dulcimer next to a creek, “She Left Through a Storm” is a more intangible meditation on their mother’s passing and the storms that passed with her. “Foggy Mountain Breakdown // Ground Speed” meanders around a 1940’s Earl Scruggs tune, recasting it as a mantra of strums. Perhaps most gripping is closer “Omie Wise // coda (How Great Thou Art),” which stretches out a Doc Watson ballad, then grafts it to a slowed-down tape of Dolly Parton’s “How Great Thou Art,” as if the best of Southern culture had survived an endless flood.
Raica
UK
UK
Seattle artist Chloe Harris, aka Raica, is a musical lifer, putting in many years as a DJ, producer, and record store owner. But her new album The Absence of Being isn’t weighed down by experience. Her music remains open and exploratory, as if each sound she’s come upon is a fresh new discovery, for both her and the listener. Many of the tracks here are simply constructed, with a few notes or chords repeated and slowly pushed forward. The spacey atmosphere that surrounds those notes gives The Absence of Being a mildly retro feel, but the music feels familiar less because it sounds like other artists than that Harris gives it all such a warm, welcoming tone, letting you enter and live inside these incredibly thoughtful tracks.
Putu Septa
San Francisco, California
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San Francisco, California
The Balinese term “piwal” doesn’t have an exact English equivalent, but according to notes for Putu Septa’s album of that name, it can mean rebellion, resistance, disobedience, denial, or deviation. All of those relate to what Septa does on the four tracks here, which are hybrids of traditional Balinese gamelan music and more unconventional forms. If you’re familiar at all with gamelan, you’ll recognize the ringing repetition, the sliding up and down scales, the overlapping reverberations. But there are times when I would swear Septa is using synths, and it’s quite possible that’s an aural effect of his singular playing. That hits hardest on the final piece, “Piwal V,” which starts softly and patiently then melds into a cacophonous wall that noise guitarists should be jealous of.
Setting
North Carolina
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North Carolina
The debut album by Setting, Shone a Rainbow Light On, came out two years ago, and since then the trio has added three live albums to its Bandcamp page. At Public Records is a hypnotic set of slow-growing meditations that’ll make you wish you had been there. Each member of Setting brings a lot to the table, with experience in such stellar groups as Pelt, Califone, and Mind Over Mirrors, and you can tell in the way they respond to each other, like craftsmen who don’t need blueprints. Jamie Fennelly’s harmonium creates clouds, Nathan Bowles’ banjo tracks time, and Joe Westerlund’s drums scaffold the growing sound. That’s strongest on the 15-minute third track, which never stops escalating but also never feels forced. It’s as if the music is flowing through the trio, and they’re happy to let it.