Andy Battaglia

Future Brown is a post-human, post-geographical electronic music collective that is both decidedly human and highly geographical. The four main members hail from far afield (Los Angeles, New York, Kuwait) but live most fully in the drifting state that artists can inhabit when they work the global circuit right. Fatima ...

Has there ever been a move more prog-rock in spirit than opening an anthology geared toward new initiates with an 18-minute opus? Signs of progginess flash red throughout the many movements of "Moon In June," a song that Robert Wyatt recorded with his early band Soft Machine in 1970. ...

Arthur Russell can be a vexing subject for tribute, for all the many reasons he was peculiar and unique. Few other expressive cellists have proven to be especially good with disco, as he was, and the same applies even more the other way around. Add his capacity — from ...

As you might expect, A Winged Victory For The Sullen doesn't play lighthearted surf-rock, nor is it a manic techno act or an oompah band. As its name suggests, it's an ambient-minded neoclassical duo that likes its sounds intensely measured, contemplative and slow.

The gist is similar for Stars ...

Ever since he made his name as a spectral carnival barker in the trip-hop troupe Massive Attack, Tricky has been a master of creeping, crawling mood music that exudes quiet defiance and makes followers consult their dictionaries every so often to reconvene with the precise definition of "crepuscular." For ...

In a way that proves surprisingly joyous and endearing, Nick Zammuto knows how to make his fans feel lazy, stunted, uninspired — certainly a lot less quick, by comparison, to jump on a surplus of exciting ideas and actually make them real. For the video of his new song "IO," ...

Kevin Martin, the shadowy English musician behind The Bug, could make "Happy Birthday" come across as a brooding dirge streaked with reminders of inescapable entropy and death. In other imposing projects — the creeping industrial-metal group God, the seething electronic act Techno Animal — he's established himself as a furrow-browed ...

Only on occasion does it make sense to praise music as scary, and somehow many of those occasions coincide with Swans sending new sounds out into the world. Since 1982, when the band emerged from the same New York "no wave" scene as noise-rock acts like Sonic Youth, Swans' seething ...

Teebs is a signature member of the collective surrounding Brainfeeder, an iconoclastic electronic label stationed in L.A. As per the habits of its exploratory founder Flying Lotus, it's big into refractions of beats and bass. Most of the roster, in different ways, favors the peculiar and the strange, but ...