Experimental

Improvisation is not solely tied to one genre of music. The notion of free-form performance is generally tied to jazz, but women in blues, experimental music, and even punk rock have all engaged in off-the-cuff creations. Women are very rarely highlighted for their ability to improvise on stage and in recordings, but everyone from Sarah Vaughan to Patti Smith has made an art of it. Even the quintessential all-female punk band, Bikini Kill, improvised on stage very often as well.These women embody the art of interacting with their audience as if they were interacting with their fellow musicians. When Nina Simone played her many interludes (before, after, and in between her rehearsed music), you felt electricity in the air. Her fingers flew across the keyboard with the ease of a sultry virtuoso, and her declarations were jarring, honest, and, at times, slightly demented. Improvisation is what pushed funk-music queen Betty Davis over the top, and it’s what made avant-garde vocalist Pamela Z and jazz pianist Geri Allen masters of their respective crafts.When women improvise, you get to see their raw talent in action and gaze into the innermost depths of their personal creativity. That’s why these women are being highlighted here: They gave their audiences, their stages, their instruments, and microphones everything they had, and they should be recognized accordingly.

British experimental pianist Tom Rogerson is set to release his debut album on Dead Oceans, but his isn’t the only name on cover—Finding Shore is billed as a full-album collaboration with avant-rock emissary Brian Eno, who threads Rogerson’s meditative playing through pulsating, droning electronic soundscapes. Prior to the album’s arrival on December 8, we asked Rogerson to compile a playlist of his favorite Eno tracks. "Instead of trying to create an Eno Greatest Hits Ive gone for the pieces that have meant the most to me over the years, including some of the most iconic songs with which hes associated, whether because of their commercial success or their conceptual influence. Ive tried to even it out so its not too tilted towards any particular decade or style. (NB: Unfortunately, Spotify is missing some of the crucial collaborations, notably those with David Byrne and Robert Fripp.)"—Tom Rogerson

The erudite Brian Eno once said, “There were three great beats in the ’70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk, and Klaus Dinger’s Neu!-beat.” They are so great, in fact, that strains of their DNA can be detected in practically every groove-based genre of the last 35 years. These include not just hip-hop and techno, but industrial and jungle/drum ’n’ bass as well. Bringing together landmark recordings from all three, this playlist is a sprawling tapestry of densely undulating polyrhythms, purring 4/4, and ecstatic syncopation punctuated with seriously nasty breaks. The bulk of the tracks feature Kuti, Brown, or Dinger, obviously. There are exceptions, however. Kraftwerk, for instance, explored Dinger’s motorik rhythm to great effect years after the group and drummer had parted ways. Hit play and find out why Eno knows what the hell he’s talking about.

The Kompakt label deserves some kind of cultural service award for Box. Released in the fall of 2016, this highly welcomed package collects the bulk of Wolfgang Voigt’s output under his GAS alias: the Zauberberg, Königsforst, and Pop albums, plus the Oktember 12-inch. Roughly 20 years after their release, these sublime recordings sound as if they were produced only yesterday. At times throbbing, and at other times profoundly glacial, they hover over the abyss between spellbinding beauty and subconsciously relaxing wallpaper, an aesthetic originally articulated by Brian Eno in the late ’70s.There’s very little ambient music created in the 21st century that doesn’t owe the GAS titles a deep debt of gratitude, and after a 17-year absence, he’s set to redefine the medium once again with his new album, NARKOPOP. Yet as influential as he is, it’s hard to frame Voigt’s output as definitive ambient techno. In fact, it’s hard to cite any album as definitive due to the genre’s ambiguous identity. Like its fuzzy textures and formless expanses, from its very birth, ambient techno exists in a state of nebulousness.Rewind to the first half of the ’90s—when the genre emerged as something of a cerebral chill-out tonic to rave’s relentless pounding, and artists as diverse as Aphex Twin, Biosphere, The Orb, Higher Intelligence Agency, Orbital, and µ-Ziq were all creating vastly different iterations of ambient techno. While the Aphex Twin classic “Xtal” is minimal and ethereal in ways that were extremely modern (and still are), HIA’s “Spectral” already felt nostalgic for dusty Jean-Michel Jarre albums when released in 1993. And then there are dub techno heavies like Basic Channel and Monolake—do they count as ambient techno? On the one hand, their explicit debt to dub reggae’s bass culture seems to place them in a parallel universe with it, yet what could possibly be more ambient than the time-expanding crackle, squelch, and hiss soaked into Basic Channel’s “Quadrant Dub I”?Rather than attempt to lock ambient techno into a rigid definition, our playlist embraces this nebulousness. Prepare yourself for a deep and expansive journey, or since this is ambient music we’re talking about, simply press play and forget about it. That’s what Brian Eno would do.

Subscribe to our "Best of Pharoah Sanders" playlist here, and follow us on Spotify here.Pharoah Sanders music is a place you can get lost in. It’s noisy and transcendent, carving out universes in tinkling vibes and jumpy blues grooves that are upturned by Sander’s trademark squawking, primal tenor saxophone. The music feels timeless. They frequently last for more than 20 minutes. But even beyond that, they seem to exist beyond our more pedestrian concepts of temporal matters. But there’s also a cultural context for all this ecstasy and upheaval, one rooted in a very specific cultural and political milieu. The New York-by-way-of-Arkansas free jazz icon had a coming out party of sorts on John Coltrane’s 1965 album Ascension. That album consists of one, 40-minute track (Spotify breaks up the track into two parts, for some reason) and marks Coltrane’s complete abandonment of post-bop for free jazz. The cascading, squealing interplay between Coltrane and Sanders sounds bracing even today, but the key to understand it is that it’s a product of a particular time and place. The Vietnam War was dramatically escalating, the social norms of post-war America were quickly being overturned, and, perhaps more importantly, the civil rights movement was splintering and turning increasingly militant: Malcolm X had been assassinated four months prior; the Black Panthers would form a year afterwards.But this isn’t nihilistic music. It’s the sound of confusion and propulsion, of being angry in a dark room, of taking a dive into a deep, unknowable abyss. In two years, Coltrane was dead, and Sanders would strike out on his own, becoming a band leader while employing the sonic template that Coltrane had forged. The 11 albums that he would release on Impulse Records over the course of the next either years -- starting with 1966’s Tauhid and ending with 1974’s Love in Us All -- serve as a high water mark or sorts for free jazz.Free Jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman once said that Sanders was "probably the best tenor player in the world,” while Albert Ayler famously quipped, "Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost.” It’s easy to understand why when listening to tracks such as “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah” or “The Creator Has A Master Plan.” The tracks capture the uncertainty and chaos of creation, they sound like either the big bang or the apocalypse. You have to destroy to build, and Sanders did plenty of both.