Pitchfork's 20 Best Experimental Albums of 2016

Pitchfork's 20 Best Experimental Albums of 2016

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Anna Meredith - Varmints
March 4, 2016
Critic Score
81
8 reviews

She wears her obvious theoretical grounding lightly and never lets it obstruct her ecstatic quest for new ideas and deranged stimuli. And Varmints is a knockout, the kind that makes you see cartoon stars.

Arca - Entrañas
July 4, 2016
Critic Score
82
4 reviews

It is darker than Mutant; it’s heavier and more unrelenting. 

Brian Eno - The Ship
April 29, 2016
Critic Score
74
27 reviews

The Ship is a great, unexpected record. The title track and “Fickle Sun (i)” on their own and as a connected piece of music are marvelous accomplishments, distinctive in Eno’s catalog. And “I’m Set Free” immediately ranks among the most perfect-sounding pop songs Eno has ever had a hand in making.

Dedekind Cut - $uccessor
November 11, 2016
Critic Score
84
3 reviews
On his first full-length as Dedekind Cut, the artist formerly known as Lee Bannon constructs an ambitious form of ambient music, reflecting the violence and anxiety pervading our atmosphere today.

Elysia Crampton - Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City
July 22, 2016
Critic Score
84
7 reviews

Demon City ... is a wonder of concision and represents another massive leap forward in her growth.

Foodman - Ez Minzoku
May 13, 2016
Critic Score
79
3 reviews

Huerco S. - For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)
June 10, 2016
Critic Score
81
7 reviews

Part of the album's magic is the way that Huerco S., after the fashion of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, has captured a feeling of fragility, of things flaking to dust before our very eyes and ears.

Jenny Hval - Blood Bitch
September 30, 2016
Critic Score
82
25 reviews
The Norwegian avant-gardist’s most atmospheric and filmic album draws on several traditions: vampire movies, the cross-hairs of art and pop, and the lineage of artwork made of menstrual blood.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - EARS
April 1, 2016
Critic Score
79
7 reviews
In her hands, acoustic instruments sound like electronic ones, synthetic sounds reference nature, and human voices sound like the creation of machines. The defining characteristics of each instrument ... are turned inside out and re-defined, giving the record a pleasingly alien mood that also feels oddly familiar.

Matmos - Ultimate Care II
February 19, 2016
Critic Score
75
18 reviews

Caressing obsolete technology, they've parodied labor's drudgeries as play. Ultimate Care II is a daydream of domesticity, a chore ignored. Call it the revolutions of everyday life.

Meredith Monk - On Behalf of Nature
October 21, 2016
Critic Score
81
2 reviews

Mikael Seifu - Seifu Zelalem
March 4, 2016
Critic Score
72
4 reviews

serpentwithfeet - blisters
September 2, 2016
Critic Score
81
4 reviews

The hybrid pop collaboration between Josiah Wise and Haxan Cloak is a sly and personal exploration of the queer experience, boiling with personal energy and fantastically operatic in scale.

Tim Hecker - Love Streams
April 8, 2016
Critic Score
80
28 reviews

Like Virgins, Love Streams tackles a lot of abstract concepts, like "live" sound, and synthetic sound, and rooms and space, and technology's ability to complicate all those things. But it's also about the ability to disappear into sound, to get lost in the contours of a slippery timbre, or to be made whole by a consonant harmony.

Yves Tumor - Serpent Music
September 30, 2016
Critic Score
76
3 reviews
Like James Ferraro or Dean Blunt, the Turin-based artist uses unsettling percussive loops and field recordings to create a mood as if lost in a strange urban landscape.
Original Source: http://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/9992-the-20-best-experimental-albums-of-2016/
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