Good Experimental Music: September 2026

Welcome to the our monthly roundup of Good Experimental Music! This time around we have turntables made of stone, scores from installations, drones that are unafraid to be dramatic, and horns playing with themselves. We present them to you in alphabetical order by artist. (And scroll down for a bonus list of 10 more September releases we dig!)

This post is free for anyone to read, so please pass it around if you dig it!

Cinchel
The 4 Stages of Long Phase
(self-released)

I've been a fan of the music of Cinchel, aka Chicago's Jason Shanley, for a long time, in part because he's so consistent; I can't remember hearing anything by him that I didn't at least like a lot. But as with pretty much any artist who is devoted to honing a sound without sweating who might be listening (most artists should do that, of course), Shanley will periodically hit on an iteration of his musical approach that finds a new peak. For me The 4 Stages of Long Phase is that kind of highlight, a focused, mega-intentional set of thick drones. Drone is probably too simple a descriptor here, as Shanley augments his long tones with subtle rhythms, distinct if gradual turns, and well-timed accents. Especially compelling is the rising, crescendo-like aspect of these pieces, especially during closer "ascension," which in its 15 minutes discovers some kind of new creative planet. Often music like this is hesitant to lean into climaxes, perhaps because it risks overstatement, but Shanley isn't afraid to scale those heights, and The 4 Stages of Long Phase is all the better for it.

Violeta Garcia & Hora Lunga
4ever
(-ous)

Last year Argentinian cellist/composer Violeta Garcia and Swiss musician/composer Hora Lunga released their first collaboration, the excellent I'll Wait for You in the Car Park. This follow-up, 4ever, furthers the language they started building on that album, though really it's more of a world of its own. Garcia and Lunga embrace radical tonal and stylistic turns from piece to piece, so we get "Buffering," a throbbing, rather harsh stretch of noisy repetition, followed by "Emotional Baggage Allowance," an aching ballad of slow notes and crying cello strains that could fit the soundtrack of a Hollywood epic. So often experimental music hews to one idea, and very often it benefits from that, but I love how Garcia and Lunga feel free to follow their ideas rather than a prescribed plan. In the process, they build a kind of intermittent narrative, once somewhat focused on travel (with titles like "I Always Cry on the Plane" and "At the Terminal but Lost), but open enough to fit whatever story you'd like to bring to it.

Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola
Sonando Gravedad 
(Notice)

There's a point early in Mexican-born artist Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola new album Sonando Gravedad in which her breathy whispers enter like a ghostly guide, providing some abstract counsel for the listener to use to navigate this fascinating set of sound essays. Later, in "Roots and Prayers," she hums along with the sounds around her, a kind of calm center in an aural storm. This dichotomy isn't the only theme in Sonando Gravedad; there are a lot of things going on here, with different moods proffered by different instruments (particularly the hymnal trumpet of Gerard Morrison). Gaxiola herself is credited with nine different musical tools, including "fossils and quartz from personal collection," but this rarely sounds like field recording or showy kitchen-sink randomness. Every sound she makes is in service of an atmosphere, a slowly-evolving cloud of that makes Sonando Gravedad more like something you enter than something you put on.

Seymour Glass
Posterior Vitreous Detachment (Video Soundtracks Vol. 1)
(Nyahh)

I go a long way back with Seymour Glass, first as a late 80s/early 90s fan of his incredible fanzine Bananafish, then as an interviewer putting him on the cover of my own fanzine Crank, then as a customer of his Tedium House webstore, then as an appreciator of his wildly varied music. He's been making the latter for a while now, probably longer than he put out Bananafish, which lasted an impressive amount of years. And it's always been as exciting and undefinable as his zine (which published some of the most awesomely weird pieces in history, including a dubious-origin "letters to the editor" section that was like theatrical poetry.) On Posterior Vitreous Detachment (Video Soundtracks Vol. 1) (perhaps a title he considered for a Bananafish 7-inch comp), he offers over two hours of indescribable audio over five tracks–and I say indescribable as a personal note, as I don't think it'll work for me to try to describe it in any detail. Suffice to say that there are unexpected aural events lurking around every corner here, and Glass stitches them together so they both settle into moods and surprise you like a jump scare. Like the best art, It's funny and scary at the same time. 

Shawn Hansen
Station To Station 4 - Sound Installation, Red
(self-released)

Kansas City (the one in Missouri)-based sound artist Shawn Hansen has been making interesting experimental music for quite a while now; if you've never taken a stroll through his work, I suggest carving out some time for it. One of his more intriguing current projects is a series of installations from a six-week exhibition called STATION TO STATION at a Brooklyn gallery a few years ago, in collaboration with painter Laurel Sparks. In this fourth release from that work, Hansen uses "the wooden Ciat Lonbarde modular synthesis system" to forge a continuous 45-minute sound-essay. The bulk of it is slow drone, but there are a lot of changes inside; skip around and you might be shocked how different each section sounds. There are also more active portions with percussion-like sounds at beginning and end, but dividing this piece seems beside the point; much like it must've been in the gallery, this is best experienced if you listen to it all in real time, and switch off that part of your brain that needs to categorize it.

Brittany Karlson and Nick Neuburg
Duo: Vol. 1
(FIM)

The cover of Brittany Karlson and Nick Neuburg's first release together, Duo: Vol 1, shows Karlson attacking her double bass with the bow angled toward the ceiling, and Neuburg scraping a snare drum with his implement (whatever it is) at a similar skew. I don't know whether this parallel aspect was a factor in how the pair chose the photos, but I like how the cover matches the music, indicating how each musician is ready and willing to do whatever it takes to find new sounds. Some of the aural events here are recognizable in string plucks and drum slaps, but so much of each piece–one 27 minute long, the other 15–contains abstract noises that evoke things like coils snapping, springs bouncing, and chalkboards being scraped by nails. The open improvisation has a kind of loose absurdity reflected in one of the near-nonsensical track titles: "i bought 78 labubus but none of them were a gold labubu: the book." Given how many pages of sound turn throughout Duo: Vol 1, I think that's a book I wanna read.

Leafcutter John
Warm Grit
(Fractal)

UK native John Burton has made music and art as Leafcutter John since the late 90s, and has intermittently risen to some mainstream-adjacent heights (he's a member of Polar Bear; he's played with Beck and Imogen Heap; he's remixed stuff by Badly Drawn Boy and many Planet Mu artists). So it's cool to see him work with Graham Dunning's Fractal Meat label, and deliver them something just as interesting and genre-dodging as any of his other work. Warm Grit includes seven tracks inspired in part by his recent hobby of rock-climbing in Northern England (he even built himself a turntable out of gritstone). There's a lot of attention to texture here, with every piece having a strong tactile aura, as if you can see Burton reaching out and physically connecting with his chosen materials. But there's also a dreamy aspect to Warm Grit that gives it more depth than a simple demonstration. Take "Disco Leg," in which ringing bells mix with static to create a smooth audio hallucination.

Rob Magill
Subtle Chaos
(Variable)

The productivity of California-based wind-player Rob Magill is a bit daunting; he's been making solo music and running the Weird Cry label since at least the early 2010s, and every release is worth diving into. Subtle Chaos is his first record for the promising L.A. label Variable, and it continues his devoted exploration of everything a sax or a clarinet can do. Here Magill plays pretty much every sax I've heard of (alto, soprano, tenor, baritone) alongside loops of same, as well as textural contributions from Daniel Masiel on electric sitar. The result is a kind of breathy hall of mirrors, with Magill's cycles doubling over each other so much it's hard to imagine which part happened when. Every track quivers and shakes with the excitement of repetition and mutation, but my favorite is "Yellow Moon Over the Mountains," which Magill calls a saxophone sextet, its chirps and ripples and note-pours all blending and battling like runners in a race who can't figure out if they're on same team (that's a compliment).

Minten & González 
Ruins of a non-existent place
(Aut / Prefermusic / Wabi-Sabi)

The use of the lower register in Ruins of a non-existent place is so impressive it's sometimes overwhelming. Just check out the two-minute track "Impatience," in which Rebecca Minten's depth-diving bass clarinet and the sea-floor electronics of Luz González merge into a massive rumble that I swore was gonna kill the woofers in my already not-so-great speakers. Bassy bombast isn't all that this duo does across the album's ten tracks, but whenever they do hit that range of the spectrum, it's almost impossible for me to do anything else besides listen. There's something about the way Minten and Luz González mix their respective sounds, drifting into unison and separating into poles, that feels oddly existential; maybe it's just song titles like "Have We Always Been Here?" and "There May Be No Place to Go" that get me thinking about big questions when I listen to Ruins of a non-existent place.

Soliton
Under Visible Sun
(love earth music)

Sounds come from everywhere on Soliton's Under Visible Sun, flying around like a swirl of dollar bills in one of those wind chambers where people try to grab as much money as they can. The trio's instrumentation is simple on paper: Walter Wright on electronics, Pippin Barnett on percussion, David Menestres on double bass. But you could easily convince someone that this is a 10-piece ensemble running around in an orchestra full of gear. Wright and Barnett in particular are hard to specifically place inside of the album's sputtering mix, as the former's squiggles and blurts interlock and rhyme with the latter's pointillist array of small sharp sounds. Menestres is not background player though, providing all sorts of plucks and runs that twist in and out of frame. It all adds up to an energizing protein shake of music; make Under Visible Sun your phone's alarm sound and I guarantee you'll wake up fresh every day.

TEN MORE GOOD EXPERIMENTAL RELEASES FROM SEPTEMBER

Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.
In A Not C
(VHF)

Ackerley Cameron Wallace
Zone Poems
(Marginal Frequency)

Antoine Bellanger
La flûte 
(UJNSQ)

Billy Gomberg
Capacity 
(Florabelle)

Grex
Auntie and Tebs
(Geomancy)

Sarah Hennies and Tristan Kasten-Krause
Prisoner's Cinema 
(Best Hill)

Dean McPhee
Northern Earth 
(Bass Ritual)

NODO + Cecilia López
Despedida de la última máquina
(Buh)

Ervin Omsk
Der Saal tobt
(Orange Milk)

Shelly Purdy
Forest Cones
(Sensitive Documents)