John Davies Cale is a Welsh musician, composer, and record producer who was a founding member of the American rock band The Velvet Underground. Over his six-decade career, Cale has worked in various styles across rock, drone, classical, avant-garde and electronic music.
async is the nineteenth solo studio album of Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto and his first one in eight years since Out of Noise (2009). It is also his first full-length solo record since recovering from throat cancer in 2015. Consisting of a combination of bizarre interpretations of familiar musical instruments, unusual textures both acoustic and electronically-made, samples of recordings of people such as David Sylvian and Paul Bowles doing readings, and everyday sounds borrowed from field recordings of city streets, async has underlying themes of the worries of the end of life and the interaction of differing viewpoints in humanity.
Danielle Dax is an English experimental musician and producer most active from the late-1970s to the mid-1990s.
Robyn Rowan Hitchcock is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist. While primarily a vocalist and guitarist, he also plays harmonica, piano, and bass guitar. After leading the Soft Boys in the late 1970s and releasing the influential Underwater Moonlight, Hitchcock launched a prolific solo career. His musical and lyrical styles have been influenced by Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Captain Beefheart, Martin Carthy, Lou Reed, Roger McGuinn and Bryan Ferry.
Tanya Donelly is an American Grammy Award-nominated singer-songwriter and guitarist based in New England who co-founded Throwing Muses with her step-sister Kristin Hersh. Donelly went on to co-form the alternative rock band The Breeders in 1989, before leaving to front her own band Belly in 1991. By the late 1990s, she settled into a solo recording career, working largely with musicians connected to the Boston music scene.
Psychedelic folk is a loosely defined form of psychedelia that originated in the 1960s. It retains the largely acoustic instrumentation of folk, but adds musical elements common to psychedelic music.
"Her Majesty" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, from their 1969 album Abbey Road. Written by Paul McCartney and credited to Lennon–McCartney, it is a brief tongue-in-cheek music hall song. Although credited to the band, McCartney is the only Beatle to appear on the track. "Her Majesty" is the final cut on the album and appears 14 seconds after the previous song "The End", but was not listed on the original sleeve. Some observers consider it the first example of a hidden track.
David Irving McAlmont is a British vocalist, essayist and art historian. He came to prominence in the 1990s as a singer, particularly through his collaboration with Bernard Butler. In the 2010s he returned to academia, working with the University of Leicester and the Architectural Association School of Architecture.
Mandalay were a trip hop duo from the United Kingdom, composed of multi-instrumentalist Saul Freeman and multi-instrumentalist-composer-singer Nicola Hitchcock. They released two albums and were briefly tagged as "Madonna's favourite band".
Karine Polwart is a Scottish singer-songwriter. She writes and performs music with a strong folk and roots feel, her songs dealing with a variety of issues from alcoholism to genocide. She has been most recognised for her solo career, winning three awards at the BBC Folk Awards in 2005, and was previously a member of Malinky and Battlefield Band.
Kevin Blechdom is an American experimental electronic musician and performance artist. She is based in Santa Cruz, California.
Hector Zazou was a prolific French composer and record producer who worked with, produced, and collaborated with an international array of recording artists. He worked on his own and other artists' albums, including Sandy Dillon, Mimi Goese, Barbara Gogan, Sevara Nazarkhan, Carlos Núñez, Italian group PGR, Anne Grete Preus, Laurence Revey, and Sainkho since 1976.
Richard Royall "Duck" Baker IV is an American acoustic fingerstyle guitarist who plays in a variety of styles: jazz, blues, gospel, ragtime, folk, and Irish and Scottish music. He has written many instruction books for guitar.
Iva Bittová is a Czech avant-garde violinist, singer, and composer. She began her career as an actor in the mid-1970s, appearing in several Czech feature films, but switched to playing violin and singing in the early 1980s. She started recording in 1986 and by 1990 her unique vocal and instrumental technique gained her international recognition. Since then, she has performed regularly throughout Europe, the United States and Japan, and has released over eight solo albums.
Sleepthief is an American electronic music recording project formed by producer and composer Justin Elswick. Elswick began writing music for the album ten years prior to its release. The album was mixed, mastered, co-produced, and co-arranged by Israel Curtis. Sleepthief's first album, The Dawnseeker, was released in 2006.
"Here She Comes Now" is a song released by the American rock band the Velvet Underground in January 1968, from their second studio album White Light/White Heat. As the shortest song on the album, the performance and mix of the song are both considered simple and traditional, making it somewhat distinct from the other five songs on the album, all of which contain some degree of experimental or avant-garde elements in terms of sound.
The Avant-Garde is an album credited to jazz musicians John Coltrane and Don Cherry that was released in 1966 by Atlantic Records. It features Coltrane playing several compositions by Ornette Coleman accompanied by the members of Coleman's quartet: Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell. The album was assembled from two unissued recording sessions at Atlantic Studios in New York City in 1960.
Thieves was a British pop duo active during the early 1990s. It was most notable for being the band on which both members – singer David McAlmont and multi-instrumentalist/producer Saul Freeman – based their subsequent musical careers.
Bajofondo is a Río de la Plata-based music band consisting of eight musicians from Argentina and Uruguay, which aims to create a more contemporary version of tango and other musical styles of the Río de la Plata region. It was founded in the early 2000s as a studio experiment, which culminated into the successful album Bajofondo Tango Club. This led to touring and eventually to the current lineup. Bajofondo calls itself a collaborative as all members have solo careers as well. The group has toured around the world, particularly in Latin America, the United States, Europe and parts of Asia. Their music is known to a wider audience than those who know their name as their music has been used in film and television.
Harold Budd was an American ambient/avant-garde composer and poet. Born in Los Angeles, he was raised in the Mojave Desert.
