Good Experimental Music: October 2026

Welcome to the our monthly roundup of Good Experimental Music! This time around we have a kind of unintentional all-star month, with quite a few experimental artists we've written about a bunch before delivering the good stuff all at once. We present these artists to you in alphabetical order - and scroll down for a bonus list of 10 more October releases we dig!

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Alex Cunningham
Axe
(Storm Cellar)

The volume of collaborations by St. Louis-based violinist Alex Cunningham over the past decade or so is pretty insane; just check the list at Discogs, which I bet doesn't even include every release he's been involved in. The ones I've heard have all been pretty high-level; Cunningham is an excellent listener and responder. But I'm still partial to his solo work, in which you can clearly hear all the intricacies of his energized playing. Axe might be his best all-alone effort yet. It offers seven improvised pieces that burst with ideas, veering between motifs, detonations, and flat-out sprints. My first instinct is to compare Cunningham to the great Billy Bang, whose solo show I saw in the '00s was one of the most mind-blowing things I've ever witnessed. But where Bang weaved jazz-leaning melodies into his spontaneous workouts, Cunningham is more purely about following his nervous-system muse wherever it leads. This sometimes results in semi-melodies too, but the kind that are more tightrope-walking than pattern-seeking. Either way, Axe's pulse should quicken yours.

Aaron Dilloway
No Skill Comedy Mind Reading
(Dais)

It's hard to believe that Aaron Dilloway's Modern Jester came out almost 15 years ago. It still reverberates so strongly, at least in my own brain - but also, I suspect, with many of those immersed in the noise scene from the early 00s to about 2013, when Wolf Eyes' John Olson declared noise was over (a bit of an exaggeration, but the scene has certainly dissipated and spread into new directions since then). Dilloway has made all kinds of interesting music since, but 2017's The Gag File in particular was kind of an MJ follow-up, and now No Skill Comedy Mind Reading provides another chapter; as Dilloway explains, "All three records are trying to find humor in the worst possible situations." He's totally right there - each album has an absurdist streak that's often quite funny - but NSCMR strikes me as the most serious of the three, in very resonant ways. Even though there is literal laughing on "Find a New Way to Laugh," these eight songs generally have a good bit of respect for the fact that laughing right now, the way things are in our world, is very close to, and sometimes almost the same as, crying. I wouldn't call NSCMR solemn, but it reflects a gravity that we're all subject to, and that makes it an apt and furthering of the work Dilloway has forged over the past decade and a half.

David Dunn
The Great Liberation Through Hearing
(Sawyer Editions)

I first learned about Daivd Dunn via Bill Perrine's great book about 70s San Diego experimental music, Alien Territory, and have been searching for his music ever since. There are a few tracks on the book's accompanying compilation courtesy of the great Nyahh label, and a handful of CDs floating around, but it's nice to hear a newer version of one of his works. The Great Liberation Through Hearing was written in 1995, and this album presents a 2021 Café Oto rendition by the group Apartment House. Performed with two violins, a viola, and a cello, the piece is presented in 10 parts, all of which move, morph, and regenerate. Dunn's composition is based on "a phonetic analysis of the names of the peaceful and wrathful deities described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead," which is interesting on its own, but you don't have to know anything about that (I didn't) to connect with this vibrant music, and the way it pierces the air while simultaneously seeming to burrow into the ground. It's also pretty scary: play it on Halloween!

Huerta Ensamble
S∞S
(Elevator Bath)

I don't know if Concepción Huerta and Daniela Huerta are related (both are Mexican, and the latter lives in Germany), but either way they appear to have a pretty strong, nearly-telepathic connection. Their duo Huerta Ensamble is described in their PR as "a collaborative research project," which is a good description considering that their music probes and digs, intent on getting to the bottom of sound. The two pieces on S∞S are both heavy and airy, evoking a kind of huge empty space through which wind, rain, and less concrete natural forces are constantly passing through. In a sense these are kind of classic high-level drones, forever changing yet always focused on one core sound. But I get the feeling that subsequent listens might put them in a different territory, one that I can't define as easily.

Sean McCann
Bitter Sea 2008-2011
(Recital)

The impact Sean McCann has had on experimental music over the past couple decades is hard to properly sum up. The vital material he's issued on his Recital label would alone be enough to give him some kind of award, but he's also made a wealth of great music himself. Bitter Sea 2008-2011 takes some of that solo work from one of his busiest periods, when he was living in San Francisco and studying audio for film, and reconfigures it into a series of short aural essays. As such, it's as hard to sum up as his aforementioned impact, but there is a through-line here of patience and reverence for what sound can do. One artist McCann has honored with Recital releases is the great Loren Connors, and I detect a bit of influence here in the way McCann seems to sometimes play in slow motion, as if pauses and silences are music on their own. But there are also a lot of enveloping atmospheres on Bitter Sea, suggesting an alternate universe take on the hazy abstractions pioneered by the Kranky label. That's an inexact comparison, though, because - see? - McCann's work is really hard to sum up. But you won't have any trouble losing yourself in it.

Nickolas Mohanna
Whistler
(self-released)

I've long been a fan of Nickolas Mohanna's work, which makes it more frustrating that I can't figure out what to say about this latest album. I do know that I love it, but I feel like I need more than a month to figure out why. Even just describing the sounds feels inadequate; Mohanna is just good at making music, and it almost doesn't matter what he uses to do it. But I guess you should know that there is guitar, piano, and drones (I assume from electronics of some sort) powering most of the six compelling tracks here, plus some excellent inputs from drummers Greg Fox and Ryan Jewell and taishōgoto player Jef Mertens. Whistler feels wide open, ready to take on any sound or move, ready to curve in any direction, and yet there's a narrative purpose to the way it proceeds, with every shift well-timed and every change in mood strongly justified. Maybe I can give one example: check the way the rolling storm-cloud "Eye Splice" trades places with the following acoustic-driven track "Long Distance," the way the two seem to both rhyme and contradict. Then check it out again, and again, and again...

Bill Nace / Mike Polizze Duo
Live at Pageant : Soloveev
(Drag City)

This ear-destroying set from Bill Nace and Mike Polizze is brisk: only 23 minutes long with no interruptions, recorded on Polizze's phone during a show in Philly in the spring of 2025. It's the first time the pair had tried sparring with guitars, and with neither being one to dally around much, they happily get straight to the point, firing out amp noise that never lets up. There was a time not long ago (well, I guess 20 years is pretty long ago) that flat-out screech like this was abundant, primarily on CD-R's, many duplicated at Nautical Almanac's Baltimore mini-factory. That was a good time, and so is this record. Nace and Polizze know that if you're gonna make noise, why wait? And why stop? Not to say that there's no variety here; there's a section over halfway through where the dissonant oscillations start to sound like electronic loops more than guitar wrangling. My only complaint might be that they should've done this for at least an hour, but leave 'em wanting more has always been a good strategy when it comes to noise, so let's hope Nace and Polizze do it some more now that our appetites have been whetted.

Jessica Pavone
...Is In the Air
(Relative Pitch)

A grid of dots graces the cover of each album violist and composer Jessica Pavone has made for Relative Pitch. I'm not sure there's any specific relevance to the music in that design choice, but I do like that Pavone has branded her work for that imprint, since there is something special about the pairing. On her sixth for the label, ...Is In the Air, we get four pieces from the ever-inventive player, two solo and two in long-distance collaboration. The former are a pair of typically-great forays into the tones and timbres of Pavone's viola, flying through a wide range of modes with both control and freedom. The partnerships, by contrast, fall a bit toward the more measured end, but they are both thrilling in their own ways, especially "Step, Line, Trade," a duet with Fred Frith on guitar in which the pair's two instruments meld and merge, then twist away from each other, then rejoin in unpredictably. It's a nice testament not only to Frith's continued vitality but to Pavone's ability to fit her strong voice into all kinds of situations.

Pete Swanson & Ilyas Ahmed
Things Left Unseen
(Geographic North)

It's kind of crazy that Pete Swanson and Ilyas Ahmed have known each other for two decades – even ending up living on the same block in Portland for the past few years – yet had never collaborated on music until queried by the great Atlanta-based label Geographic North. Created in Ahmed's home studio, Things Left Unseen finds the pair in comfortable sonic conversation, with Ahmed playing guitar and Swanson reprocessing those sounds in real time. It's kind of a duo with one source and two outputs, but the resulting music is much larger than the sum of those parts. Each side of the tape contains an unedited 12-minute piece. On the A side, "Room of One" starts as a glistening pond of notes, then evolves into a morass of bright noise; on the B side, "After Leaving," a similar arc is traced in a gentler way, with the climax diving under water rather than poke up through the clouds. As a lifetime Yellow Swans fanatic it's hard for me not to hear echoes of Swanson's duo with Gabe Saloman here, but there's also no denying that Ahmed's thoughtful playing has a timbre all its own.

Rhonda Taylor
alien
(self-released)

Breath is obviously a key to any saxophone playing, but it seems especially central to the music of Rhonda Taylor. On Alien, a set of solo improvisations, you can hear many inhalations and exhalations, some sounding like transmissions from some far-off spacecraft. I'm guessing part of why Alien sounds so full of breath is that for many of the tracks, Taylor uses her soprano sax without a mouthpiece, turning it into more of a wind tunnel than a note generator. But much of the sound on Alien is hard to tag to any recognizable technique, which is part of what makes it so fascinating; half the time I'm not even thinking about a horn or what's being done to it when I'm listening. Some of the more powerful pieces sound inhuman, yet everything has an emotional tone that's unmistakably biological. Taylor's playing is also plainly about connection; in her notes, she insists, "I'm trying my best to express what is inside of me at the time, in the hopes that it might also sound like some of what's inside of you." That simple plan reaps great rewards on Alien.

TEN MORE GOOD EXPERIMENTAL RELEASES FROM OCTOBER

Pekka Airaksinen
Hevajra
(Other Power)

Geologist & Kyle Simon
The Sirens
(Outside Time)

Gneiss
Regolith
(Harmonic Ooze)

Francisco Mela
Carnaval De Oriente
(577)

Al Margolis & Jeff Surak
Violet If
(Zeromoon)

More Eaze
valley and structure
(Thrill Jockey)

Rachel Shearer
Te Oro o te Ao
(Thin Wrist)

Silk Fence 
Silk Fence
(Sophomore Lounge)

Various Artists
Filament
(Silver Threads)

Matt Weston
Call Out the Instigators
(7272)