The best experimental music from the Bay Area in 2022
Ambient poetry by Briana Marela, ice cold field recordings by Cheryl E. Leonard, Buchla electric magic by Beaunoise, BART jazz by Zekarias Thompson, and more
Ready for another year-end list? How about eight?
In celebration of all the great music released by Bay Area artists over the past year, we’ll be sharing daily wraps of our favorite releases of 2022. Starting today, every day we’re publishing a new list highlighting the best music from the Bay Area across a wide variety of genres, including dance, downtempo, folk, hip hop, metal, and rock.
Read on for the best experimental music from the Bay in 2022, or shuffle the playlist.
You Are a Wave - Briana Marela
These are compositions to listen to again and again, to marvel at for their beauty and their sophisticated design, perhaps to attempt to deconstruct the album’s technical complexity, to melt at the range of vocal performance by Briana Marela.
You Are a Wave pulls on heartstrings, gently rocking one deeper into the fragile crevices of the artist’s loneliness, grief, and even joy. Marela takes her time building on these textures to craft the rawness of her experience in reinterpreted sonic space. By paying particular attention to the silence between the notes, and sedated rhythmic Buchla oscillations, she casts whimsical yet meaningful constellations of sound—like the unimaginably distant connections between stars within an ever-expanding universe. The tracks “Turquoise and Amethyst” and “Arc” display this expansive space-play best, while others showcase a near-operatic mix of contemporary classical interludes, vocal sound experiments, and gut-wrenching poetry. Gripping, intimate, a must-listen.
— Elise Mills
Antarctica: Music from the Ice - Cheryl E. Leonard
“An Antarctica that may no longer exist, at least how the composer saw and heard it.” In 2009, as a participant in the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, SF sound artist Cheryl E. Leonard lived and worked at a research station in Antarctica for five weeks. While there, Leonard collected a trove of field recordings of water, ice, and wildlife—birds, elephant seals, penguins—of which she released a selection in 2010 as Chattermarks: Field Recordings from Palmer Station.
More than a decade later, Leonard returns to the material with the release of Antarctica: Music from the Ice on Other Minds Records. Unlike Chattermarks, which presented the field recordings in their raw state, this album brings the artist’s initial vision to life as a complete musical composition. Interweaving the original sound sources with performances on rocks, shells, and penguin bones (which Leonard crafted into idiophones and sculptural percussion instruments), Antarctica is both an objective capsule as well as a subjective view into a specific place at a specific time. Given climate change and rapidly changing ecosystems—especially at remote places like Antarctica—it’s no wonder the value of a work like this: Nowhere on the planet may ever sound quite like this ever again.
— Ronny Kerr
Apricot Angel - Flung
“The most focused thing that I’ve ever done. But it's funny because, in my mind, I'm already onto the next one.” It’s fitting that she’s already moving on, because Apricot Angel is all about transitions. Transitional spaces, transitional times, transitional ways of being, and musical transition. On Virginia/NYC label Citrus City Records, the new album from Oakland-based multi-instrumentalist Flung, aka Kashika Kollaikal, is a meditative, meandering collage of sparkling experimental pop inspired by the Bay Area’s most transitional ecosystems: shores and tide pool. Not just serving as “an important imagined site for explorations of her transness,” these liminal spaces directly inform the music, with special attention paid to the transitions between tracks as much as the changes and transformations that occur within them. An exploration of nature, the world, self, and between states, Apricot Angel couldn’t sound any riper.
— Ronny Kerr
Baptismal - Rent Romus’ Actual/Actual
“Improbable connections are made and things happen when you least expect them to.” Storied Bay Area saxophonist Rent Romus’ new experimental jazz ensemble Actual/Actual boasts incredible musicianship, expressing a delightful effervescence, whimsicality, and versatility. Traversing the bounds of swing, Latin music, fusion, doom rock, reggae, and punk with “a blues music orientation,” the group’s debut album Baptismal demonstrates that genres are really quite fluid. Spectral moments surface throughout as a bit of other-worldliness emerging from brassy cacophony. Raucous, delicately haunting, and most definitely coy, the album has a kind of nonchalant majesty to it. Punk rock, indeed.
— Elise Mills
Buchlaworks: Module III - Beaunoise
Made on a wide assortment of Buchla Electric Music Boxes, Buchlaworks: Module III is a beautiful display of the instruments’ ability to create otherworldly soundscapes. At times contemplative or eerie, and other times upbeat and agitated, this collection of “Panoramics” has a crunchy, organic quality that you expect from modular synthesizers. As an aside, Don didn’t tend to call his instruments synthesizers because he didn’t want to give the impression that his instruments were imitating existing sounds, they were in fact creating new sounds.
Recorded during an extended stay at Panoramic House in Stinson Beach, this album was created around improvised performance. It was there that Beau Sorenson was inspired by a visit from one of his musical heroes (I’m guessing fellow synth enthusiast Suzanne Ciani) to embrace the spontaneous nature of the Buchla Music Box. Expect the unexpected and burrow into this warm piece of electric vibrations.
— Elliot Engel
Goodnight Shiva - Zekarias Thompson
“An atmospheric meditation through echoed saxophone recordings, spoken word and images that speak on isolation, the body and blackness.” Hat tip to Cone Shape Top for sharing this beautiful new work, Goodnight Shiva by Zekarias Thompson. Released this past May on Washington, D.C.’s Atlantic Rhythms, the full-length album is a kaleidoscopic cycle of experimental ambient sounds, jazz, and poetry.
— Ronny Kerr
SK-1 - Wonderful World
“Circuit-bending is the process of modifying vintage electronics or toys in unintended ways to essentially ‘hack’ the sound chips to make odd noises. It's an uncalculated process that requires no technical background, involves trial and error, and often results in unreproducible or fleeting effects.” SK-1 is the first full-length album of experimental noise and ambient music from Wonderful World, a new project by SF artist Richard Caceres (who, full disclosure, is also my cousin). Accompanied by a full-length video made on a vintage Amiga computer, the album begins with a simple, improvised flute tone before veering into digital explosions, erratic blips, and chiptune soundbaths. Is this what androids actually dream of?
— Ronny Kerr
Collected Works (2018-2021) - Jerod S. Rivera
Selected by Elise Mills.
The will to nurture - HALCYON
“The will to extend one's self for the the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.” Inspired by this definition of love written by bell hooks, The will to nurture is the newest full-length from Berkeley producer HALCYON. Buoyed somewhere between experimental and downtempo electronic music—with an awareness of club music most obviously manifested on the final track “Back to me”—the album is awash with the sound of the shoreline. From the watery first moments to the end, this liquidity binds together the continuously morphing music, as it journeys through ambient soundscapes and synth-laden mazes. To be treasured as an album for people who still listen to complete albums.
— Ronny Kerr
Holly - Kathryn Mohr
“I feel like I stumbled upon this song somewhere in my mind, like finding something to cherish on a littered shoreline… Lost media, analog artifacts, forgotten things by the bay, memories just out reach.”
Cast in sepia mystique, Kathryn Mohr’s sophomore album Holly explores a yearning that steeps into forgotten crevices of the mind, increasing in potency long after the first listen. Understated with just a touch of the avant-garde, Mohr nestles instrumental, time-defying vignettes of both whimsical melodies and field recordings within spell-binding indie ballads, reflecting on loss, memory, and other things intangible and precious. Poignant and captivating.