Oddly enough my neighbor used to be the sound guy for Sheryl Crow, seriously…
So her name jumped to the top of my list for pop music…
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Well, give this guy a modern performance sampler and he mihgt create a quite interesting beat with all those recordings … and nobody would laugh 
right, but always found the laughing of the audience to be a part of the composition, so i don’t mind…
You’ll know when
“Open Mike and Friend’s Sublime Submersible Liquid Fantasy of the Surreally Real Back Corners of your own Universal Mind’s Love to be Brought Forth and Awakened Tour”
hits your town, no doubt about that!
I had no idea John Cage was in the public spotlight. I thought for some reason he was some obscure composer at the time. Great to see videos like that.
I found out about him because he was said to have influenced the Beatles Revolution #9…
oh man, beatles… i had no idea. good find mike!
btw. i just read that cage was one of the first that used the term experimental music to describe his
work that based on aleatoric principles.
i did not check the forum for few days and it was nice to find all these posts so had to catch up 
i do agree with pretty much all that’s been said and as mentioned in previous posts, for the listener is not always a ‘nice experience’ having to listen to experimental music, whether it being bleeps and blops or whatever it could be…
is experimentation somehow listener/market driven nowadays (for some of course)? i mean, do people experiment to be part of that (what i think once was) niche so that they can proudly post on the web they are experimental musician (if that even makes a sense anymore)…or is there a ‘real need’ for that? is it something that happens because one wants to find something new or simply because it is now easier for people to access the tools that allow to experiment and everybody can actually do that and show others what they’re capable of (…then you go ask where’s a C# and they might not know…bbut…that’s another thing… 
) ?
looking back at people like john cage, delia derbyshire, peter gabriel or yes, bjork, brian eno, aphex twin…and those i don’t even know the existence of 
…i mean…the list could go on for a while i think 
all those musicians were/are driven from the need to experiment and create new music, and of course, being the first to do that, it gave/gives that advantage to actually be the first to do this or that experiment and not being influenced from the fact that they ‘needed’ to do that to have one million hits on their yt video (…mm…maybe would have been diffrent if yt would have been around already…who knows…). sure, they probably wanted to make a living out of it but still…
The OP1’s tombola sequencer comes to mind.
Mostly resulted in bleeps and bloops, but I did manage to get at least one song out of it that I was quite happy with. Although I suspect most people would probably call that song a random string of bleeps and bloops (if they were being polite) since it doesn’t really sound anything like what we would normally categorise as a song.
Does that make it experimental music? Maybe, or not. Trying to play the bloody thing was certainly an interesting experiment.
I would say, definitely yes … and there will be more. Maybe some of them are not as “new”, as I think, but at least they are different from the most often used approaches or they may be new combinations of techniques.
Just let’s look to all those west-coast style approaches to form sound that have been shown for eurorack and are keeping up to come. If somebody comes up with a new kind of VCO, or effect, be it analogue or digital, we might get exactly those new tools to experiment with …
Two examples here:
There is an interesting plug-in available since last week, or so, called Mushroom generator (by Soundmote)
It seems to be an interesting “combination” of techniques to form and shape waveforms, which is different from the usual single wave-shapers, wave-folders etc… I have played with it for some hours … and … yes … there is something “different” and “interesting”.
Or let’s check out machines like the Lyra-8 by Soma Laboratory. Created by a guy with a kind of philosophical approach to organic …
We have only to give those techniques a try. The Lyra-8 is so unconventional IMO that I guess that everybody trying to play it, will come up with new ideas …
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I think NI Form is really interesting and quite unique. Also Iris or Alchemy.
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Also if we take NI-Reaktor or Reaktor-Blocks … 
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for sure. and eurorack is full of innovative modules. some with synthesis types hardly ever seen in hardware before. all under cv control.
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This is my favorit performance of experimental music.
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I tend to describe the music I make as experimental, but I think that’s mainly because:
- a lot of the music I most enjoy listening to is abstract or experimental music.
- I have no understanding of music theory, scales, chords, rhythms or anything like that! Therefore what I’m doing is very much experimenting.
I tend to look at this question the other way round… I often wonder whether all music is experimental? It’s all a process of trial and error, finding out what works, what doesn’t and sometimes happy accidents end up becoming part of your sound.
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There is a decent chance that anything I think of experimenting with - synthesis, effects, OP-1 tape manipulation - which is modeled on old school tape manipulation - granular synth manipulation of samples, other sample mangling approaches, etc - has already been done by somebody else.
I don’t see a problem with that, though, because there’s still plenty of room to explore, as opposed to the increasingly well-worn road of, say, rock guitar; where one hears the same blues-rock licks and riffs ad infinitum.
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when does music stop being experimental? let’s say all of the process (trial and error, troubleshooting, serendipitous results) occurs before it’s refined and presented to an audience (as a product, performance, etc.)
a band playing a live performance, for instance. the music is really ‘out there’ - oddly-structured (is there a structure?), with a novel array of instrumentation and techniques honed, or practiced, to play the instruments in unorthodox ways (no-input mixer, for example) …but the players are familiar with the behavior of their tools, they know what sounds will occur by affecting/exciting/manipulating the instrument in certain ways. it’s extremely strange, esoteric-sounding music, but it’s really well-rehearsed, and determined - the results are no longer indeterminate, or experimental (maybe they’re testing it on the audience, to gauge a response) - but it’s likely that this super weird, even “avant garde” music will get lumped in with the “experimental” genre-umbrella anyway, by lazy nincompoops. sorry if this point has already been addressed.
edit: this all was addressed in the first post. I’m an idiot.
Yes, this whole discussion very much depends on what the definition of “experimental” means to you. I’d probably lump a lot more of the interesting music I listen to under the umbrella experimental than someone else would.
We could also consider - and I think this this is not a wrong description - most of the musicians play intstruments and make music in a way, which has been defined by others before and they are also educated in some quite traditional way. There is not much experimenting expected nor stimulated. Why …
A teacher will teach us how to approach a keyboard, a guitar or any other instrument. This will be combined with playing compositions created by masters of the particular genre or again teachers. Later most musicians will continue, particularly if making money from music, playing compositions of others or creating compositions, which are made according to the rules of a particular genre. Let’s only look for this at all those traditional scoring techniques used for creating film music, or the many musicians, which use a similar setup and create music in a particular genre.
Experiments are always in risk of beeing not accepted by the audience, because most of us have expectations. If those are not satisfied, we say “good bye”, at the least.
IMO to break free of those traditions, fulfills the criterium of beeing “experimental”. The backside is, if the experimental stuff get’s enough love, it will be traditional too, after a while