avant-garde Archive

It’s a delight to stumble upon music that resolutely resists categorization. That’s the case with Multiversum, the latest album form Finnish musician Jimi Tenor. His chosen instrumental palette suggests jazz, but the music draws from trip-hop, electronica, baroque pop and other disparate inspirations. One moment the music seems to bear the influence of Burt Bacharach;

Inscrutable art/music collective celebrates its 50th anniversary with the first in a series of books chronicling its history Surveying the landscape of 20th and 21st century music, one is unlikely to encounter anything stranger than the body of work credited to The Residents. The intentionally anonymous collective has been charting its own path – in

Continued from Part One… Bill Kopp: The Residents’ Ralph Records was launched in ’72, and the label always existed well outside of what could be considered the ‘commercial sphere.’ In some ways, that almost made its existence sort of counterintuitive. Was there ever a point at which the label was financially remunerative, and was that

Few in the early 1970s might have predicted that one of music’s strangest (and most original) acts would continue to tour and release new music well into the 21st century. But San Francisco-based avant garde collective The Residents have always confounded expectations. Though the group’s history is by design murky and mysterious, it’s generally accepted

Much of what passes for avant garde music tends toward a kind of seriousness, a dour approach that screams, “this is art!” and all but insists that the listeners revel in its importance. Accessibility rarely figures into the mix, and that’s the point, kind of. But there are exceptions. The work of Sun Ra certainly