This is always a difficult list to compile because the word “experimental” so often means music that is difficult to categorize. Or difficult to describe. Or just difficult. But these are some of our favorite unfamiliar, unsettling, provocative, transgressive, spaced-out, psychedelic, surreal, meditative, confrontational, and, sure, difficult albums of the year. This is just a tiny fraction of all the musique concrète, neo-classical, avant-garde, and ambient jazz music that was put out this year. And hopefully, this can be a launching pad to discover artists that didn’t quite fit on this list, or anywhere else for that matter.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2023 wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
André 3000: New Blue Sun
Think of the qualities we associate with André 3000: his dynamite conviction, eagerness to channel moods around him, and that impish penchant for doodling way outside the lines. Does this not sound precisely like the guy who’d drop 87 minutes of prismatic flute improv, new-age synth washes, and ayahuasca growls? All those times you wigged out to “B.O.B.,” which Three Stacks were you lionizing exactly? No doors are closed but several windows have swung open, and the breeze—accented by floral notes of Yusef Lateef, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Laraaji, and the Leaving Records community he’s spent years trilling with—is blissful. New Blue Sun doesn’t need a single bar to get its message across: that side quests are often the most memorable part of the entire game. –Gabriel Szatan
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Arooj Aftab / Vijay Iyer / Shahzad Ismaily: Love in Exile
Five years after they first performed an improvised set together, the wildly talented musicians Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily took to the studio for Love in Exile, an LP they recorded in long takes with only light editing. Its six pieces unfold as immersive meditations, with the artists drawing from wells of jazz, Urdu poetry, and spirituality. Aftab’s vocals gesture at themes of love and loss, while Ismaily and Iyer surround her with fluid piano and softly undulating bass. Iyer has described Love in Exile as part of a deeper personal reckoning around South Asian culture and communion, and the trio’s mind-melding chemistry serves as a beacon of unspoken connection. –Allison Hussey
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Bill Orcutt: Jump on It
The freewheeling noise-rock guitarist’s first solo acoustic record in a decade finds him in spry picking shape, exploring far corners with earnest curiosity. A win for the finer side of American guitar revivalism. –Allison Hussey
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Blue Lake: Sun Arcs
It’s no surprise that Blue Lake’s Sun Arcs started at a cabin in the woods. The latest album by multi-instrumentalist Jason Dungan has the gentle, unbothered pace of a week spent in nature: stirring with the sunrise, hiking in the forest, sleeping with the night air’s chill on your face. With his custom-built 48-string zither and a small mountain of supporting instruments, Dungan uncovers an acoustic-ambient sound that feels hewn from the spruce and pine that surrounded him when he conceived it. His lively playing, inspired equally by the open-ended explorations of free jazz and the homespun intricacy of John Fahey, breathes life into these compositions like wind through branches. –Brad Sanders
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Daniel Villarreal: Lados B
Like Bobby Hutcherson did for his 1975 chill-out fusion classic, Linger Lane, Daniel Villarreal recorded his album outside in the California breeze. Percussionist Villarreal, bassist Anna Butterss, and guitarist Jeff Parker may have been forced into the backyard, in part, due to the pandemic, but they also deliver the tight-knit feel of a combo having a little midday potluck: Brazilian funk, dub, soul, and ambient jazz are all on the table. Think of Lados B somewhere between Villarreal’s lively debut, Panamá ’77, and Parker’s subdued Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, scented with a little more BBQ smoke and jasmine. –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Drazek Fuscaldo: June 22
Trumpeter/guitarist Przemyslaw Krys Drazek and vocalist Brent Fuscaldo have been working in the Chicago avant-garde scene for well over a decade, both as Mako Sica and now as Drazek Fuscaldo. This set for Astral Spirits brings out Tatsu Aoki’s shamisen and Joshua Abrams’ hypnotic double bass and taps into the history of Chicago’s psychedelic past: You can hear this as an early incantatory Thrill Jockey record or a more spiritual-jazz outgrowth of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The music trickles out of the speakers but finds many grooves, electric and acoustic, elemental and ethereal. –Jeremy D. Larson
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Dustin Wong: Perpetual Morphosis
Using his guitar, voice, and an array of electronics, Dustin Wong creates sound worlds that teem with living texture. Listening to Perpetual Morphosis is like watching stop-motion footage of a rainforest floor: notes skittering around like industrious insects in the dirt while others operate on an entirely different timescale, growing and blooming with the patience of plants. Like that rainforest, the music’s surface chaos belies deep and elegant interconnectivity—take away one element and the whole thing might collapse. –Andy Cush
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Ellen Arkbro: Sounds While Waiting
Ellen Arkbro builds her walls of harmonic resonance by setting up sustained chords on several organs in one room. These trembling tones feel elongated yet enclosed, stretching out like miles of brightly lit tunnel. As each harmony builds on Sounds While Waiting, you can hear textures rippling, dissolving, and reemerging along the way. –Madison Bloom
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Eyes of the Amaryllis: Perceptible to Everyone
On Perceptible to Everyone, Philadelphia’s Eyes of the Amaryllis craft hushed dispatches of warped jazz and ambient murmurs. Never boiling over, their phrases of plucked guitar, papery percussion, and whispered vocals keep at a steady but quietly discomforting simmer. Like Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, these songs are composed of faint strokes that seem like the ghosts of a brasher canvas. –Madison Bloom
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Gia Margaret: Romantic Piano
Chicago’s Gia Margaret teased “a return to more traditional forms of songwriting” after 2020’s ambient, almost entirely instrumental Mia Gargaret. Nevertheless, on Romantic Piano, the follow-up, Margaret retains her mischievous minimalism through keyboard whimsy, post-rock abstraction, and guitar introspection, opting for lyrics and vocals only once, on “City Song.” The doors of perception aren’t that hard to wrest ajar; Margaret, who’s shifted the meaning of “traditional songwriting,” knows you just have to give them a playful nudge. –Marc Hogan
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Gigi Masin / Greg Foat: Dolphin
This is only one of several albums that UK jazz pianist and Venetian electronic artist have put out this year, but Dolphin slides down all the faders in the house and brings out the smoothest in both of them. Masin’s seaside, ambient synth programming and Foat’s ’70s smoky, soul-jazz playing are in quiet but constant conversation, complicating your ill-advised decision to put this record on at a dinner party. If it’s not a too-funky organ line, then it’s too-beautiful modal piano riff—it’ll always find a way to pull focus and draw you in. –Jeremy D. Larson
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Greg Foat / Art Themen: Off-Piste
Pianist-producer Greg Foat and saxophonist Art Themen hit the slopes together on their relaxed, dazzling, and loosely ski-themed album. The pair slalom breezily through their long, downtempo, ambient-jazz passages with racks of synths strapped to their back. Spacey and groovy, feels like a blast of icy morning air with the intimate coziness of hunkering down indoors on frigid days. –Allison Hussey
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Irreversible Entanglements: Protect Your Light
Since forming at a protest over police brutality in 2015, Irreversible Entanglements have become reliable purveyors of righteous free-jazz fury. Protect Your Light, the East Coast quintet’s first album for the legendary Impulse! label, keeps up the thrilling virtuosity and radiates a newfound warmth. Noise, protest, and polyrhythms remain alongside declarations of love and hope. Capturing it all is drummer Tcheser Holme on “root <=> branch,” calling to mind A Love Supreme as he chants, “We can all be free.” –Marc Hogan
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jaimie branch: Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war))
In a time when hope can feel especially hard to muster, jaimie branch’s Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) is full of it. On her final album as a bandleader, recorded weeks before her sudden death at age 39, the fire-breathing trumpeter, composer, and vocalist blasts the colonialist mindset over rapturous grooves, sings of liberation from drudgery in lilting folk song, and dismantles the segregationist framework of genre by incorporating vernacular sounds both global and homegrown. The album brims with joy and righteous anger, and illuminates the communal ties that underpin both. –Jonathan Williger
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Jake Muir: Bathhouse Blues
The Berlin-based sound artist offers a brooding, hazy dive into queer lust. Taking inspiration from furtive, hushed-breath bathhouse cruising between men, Jake Muir drenches his expressionistic mood piece in the sounds of footsteps and dripping water, undulating synths that dissipate into thin air, and tantalizing clips of dialogue lifted from vintage gay porn. It all blends into one pensive, hypnotic brew whose heady vapors linger long after it’s finished. –Eric Torres
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Jonny Nash: Point of Entry
Jonny Nash, who runs the Amsterdam-based ambient label Melody as Truth, returned this year with Point of Entry, his first album in four years. Recorded at home during the early morning, this soft-focus music simmers at a low temperature: acoustic guitar paint brushstrokes beneath buoyant synths that seem dappled in sunlight. Nash’s gentle, meandering vocals lend the album an ebbing, stream-of-consciousness flow into which you can easily dip at your own meditative pace. –Eric Torres
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L’Rain: I Killed Your Dog
With L’Rain, Taja Cheek collapses genres into smearing montages that are as alive and unpredictable as a fever dream. Her third album expands into spiky garage rock, lavish psych-folk, and misty dance-pop, turning toward romantic love as its primary subject. The sounds are more immediate and broadly appealing than ever, but Cheek hasn’t lost her restless ingenuity: The creature put to rest on its Auto-Tuned lullaby of a title track may be a cherished pet, or it may be the narrator herself. –Marc Hogan
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Laurel Halo: Atlas
On Atlas, her fifth solo album, experimental artist Laurel Halo weaves entire tapestries from scraps of piano, cello, voice, and synth; she tugs at each composition’s loose threads, sometimes unraveling the entire piece, sometimes drawing it tighter. Atlas’ contradictions are beguiling: It has a complex emotional core, a tender but firm existential pull that can be equally comforting and disquieting. It’s beautiful but not serene, dissonant but never harsh—gentle ambient music that discourages zoning out. –Dash Lewis
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Leo Takami: Next Door
You needn’t be a deep jazz head to appreciate Toyko guitarist Leo Takami’s Next Door. Each piece is an evocative and welcoming soundscape: You’ll hear a reverbed-out piano playing single notes in unison with an icy digital chorus on “Road with Cypress and Star,” and synth-like guitar tone on “As If Listening.” It sounds immaculate. Pay close attention to Takami’s playing and you’ll find it full of personality and invention, making him the rare musician who is as deft with melody and harmony as he is with stylish atmosphere. –Andy Cush
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Lia Kohl: The Ceiling Reposes
Chicago-based cellist and composer Lia Kohl considers found sounds—like grainy radio transmissions and vibrant birdsong—to be unconscious collaborators. On her latest album, The Ceiling Reposes, Kohl braids these emissions with tendrils of cello, choral passages, concertina, and a wind machine to craft rippling compositions that subtly morph as they intertwine. Kohl, summoning resonant swells on her instrument, acts as a conduit between these sonic clippings, which sound familiar and alien all at once. –Madison Bloom
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Lonnie Holley: Oh Me Oh My
Lonnie Holley’s fourth album is like a cosmic mixtape, placing the septuagenarian outsider artist’s ruminations on slavery, mortality, and intergenerational Black trauma in communion with a range of stylistic diversions and high-profile guests. While Michael Stipe’s world-weary croon enriches the title track, and Malian vocalist Rokia Koné’s untethered wail lifts up “If We Get Lost They Will Find Us,” Oh Me Oh My remains centered around Holley and his story of survival in a country that has long conspired to deny his humanity. He finds cathartic liberation in speaking his truth; as he intones on the penultimate track, these reminiscences serve “to pull myself free.” –Zach Schonfeld
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Martyna Basta: Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering
Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering is an ode to memory rendered with delicate acoustic phrases and Polish composer Martyna Basta’s personal field recordings. A wind-blown bit of tinfoil, the rim of a wine glass, rustling leaves, and plucked zither are treated with equal reverence because, for Basta, a mundane object, simple as an ice cube, is a portal into the bleary realm of the past. –Madison Bloom
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Natural Information Society: Since Time Is Gravity
There’s a reason they’re called Natural Information Society: this long-running Chicago ensemble is less concerned with virtuosic solo showcases than communal rhythm, each voice contributing equally to the hypnotic whole. Still, like any healthy democracy, there is room for individual expression, whether it’s tenor saxophonist Ari Brown weaving long, bluesy, and contemplative melodies above the din or bandleader Joshua Abrams spinning out a new variation with practically every percolating repetition of his basslines. The pieces on Since Time Is Gravity unfold patiently over long stretches, focused on gradual rather than sudden shifts: You might start in one headspace and find yourself somewhere completely different a few minutes later, without ever noticing that anything has changed. –Andy Cush
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Pat Metheny: Dream Box
Dream Box found Pat Metheny as much as the legendary jazz guitarist made the album of his own free will. He rediscovered some of his older recordings while on tour and liked them enough to compile them for the new release. The album, with its sedate and stirring compositions for electric guitar, captures the same feeling of happenstance, rich in detail and living between familiar and mysterious. –Matthew Strauss
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Raphael Rogiński: Talàn
In the patient hands of Raphael Rogiński, a semi-hollow electric guitar can sound both ancient and futuristic. Drawing from free jazz, freak folk, Hasidic mystical songs, and Delta blues, Talàn takes the sparse, solo guitar meditations of 2015’s exquisite Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes African Mystic Music and stretches out toward eerie new crossroads. In the long pauses between notes, you can almost hear tumbleweeds blowing across Martian soil, but Rogiński’s singular finger-picking conveys a spiritual ache that is deeply, transcendently human. –Marc Hogan
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Ruth Anderson / Annea Lockwood: Tête-à-tête
Sound collagists Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood first met by chance in the early 1970s when Pauline Oliveros recommended Lockwood to take over Anderson’s post as the director of the electronic music studio she founded at Hunter College in New York while away on sabbatical. They forged an instant connection that grew into a lifelong bond as romantic and artistic partners; the couple composed together and apart, crafting inimitably playful, minimalist works until Anderson’s death in 2019. On Tête-à-tête, a combination of archival material and new work put together by Lockwood, their quiet alchemy comes to light: During “Conversations,” the 18-minute centerpiece, Lockwood stitches together years’ worth of recordings of Anderson’s voice chatting and laughing during phone calls with brief passages from old pop songs, capturing romantic, homespun bliss at its purest. –Eric Torres
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Ryuichi Sakamoto: 12
It’s difficult not to consider Ryuichi Sakamoto’s final album through the lens of his death in April. He began recording it a couple of years ago, not long after receiving his second cancer diagnosis; he completed the last piece just two months before announcing that the disease had progressed to stage four. Yet these patient, contemplative, quietly rapturous studies for piano and synthesizer are not mournful—at least, no more than the rest of the composer’s gorgeously melancholy oeuvre, which spans more than four decades. Softly tracing repetitive figures and halting motifs that touch on jazz, Romanticism, and his own back catalog, Sakamoto uncovers moments of joy in changes that seem to move of their own volition, like leaves in the wind. He knew the piano inside and out, but was still finding chords that could surprise and delight. And though his days were numbered, he let these pieces unspool as though he had all the time in the world. –Philip Sherburne
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Scree: Jasmine on a Night in July
The Brooklyn trio adds keys, organ, and woodwinds to support the weight of history as received through the work of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and the legacy of Arabic music in jazz. The mood is reflective and poignantly unresolved, the story never finished so long as it’s still being told. Scree tell it the way the best history books do: rich in tradition with a flair for melodrama and plenty of time to take in the scenery. –Anna Gaca
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Titanic: Vidrio
Mexico City’s Mabe Fratti turns to ornate melodic experiments in collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Héctor Tosta as Titanic. Cello, piano, drums, and horns tumble and crash around one another, with Fratti’s vocals as a floating throughline. Like bits of sea glass washing up in the surf, Vidrio’s beauty lies in its rounded edges, beguiling haziness, and off-kilter charms. –Allison Hussey
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Yara Asmar: synth waltzes and accordion laments
Yara Asmar was drawn to the accordion by fate: The Lebanese multidisciplinary artist found her grandmother’s vintage Hohner Marchesa in her parents’ attic and taught herself to play it, tapping into its warmly reedy sound to accent her synth recordings. The result is the drifting synth waltzes and accordion laments, a set that transmutes the instrument’s droning tones into a sweep of introspective, breath-catching moments of beauty. –Eric Torres
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
