EVERY GENRE PACKAGES: Artisans of the Avant-Garde (9 January 2025)
Artisans of the Avant-Garde: Visionaries
In today’s genre grouping to cover the sprawling, year-long list of genres that I covered in 2024, we celebrate those musical luminaries who looked beyond their own musical moment with inventive and even subversive musical takes.
Production wizardry is the driving force of many of these genres. Jamaican-born dub kicked the year off, and it was a perfect genre to do so for its far-ranging impact across the musical world. Its production techniques stretched the limits of what electronic manipulation could evoke, pioneering the idea of a remix. What would life be like without the remix?
These genres confronted dominant styles across scenes, from jazz fusion daring to dip into rock and electronic experimentalism to chamber pop throwing off the muddle of blending guitars of grunge shoegaze (which, in its moment with ethereal wave, popularized avant-garde techniques) in favor of rich, organic instrumentation. Indeterminacy questioned the notion that the composer knows best, leaving the interpretation more in the hands of the instrumentalist and universal randomness. Post-punk invited a world of sounds into the punk scene, in a successful bid to out-punk punk by rising above normative discourses about what should ‘count’ as punk.
Others are avant-garde for foreseeing sounds that would capture successive generations of producers. Ambient broke rock out of structural conventions and opened a Pandora’s box of atmospheres. New beat combined dance’s visceral bodily connection with brash robotics with a sound that has emanated through decades of dance music movements. Certain more recent developments like hard drum, glitch-hop, rare phonk, and organic house seem poised to expand dance and rap music’s tones and textures.
Above all, these genres are a reminder that one never knows which cutting-edge sound is a moment from taking off, so it’s paramount to keep your ears open and your net widespread.
CHECK OUT THESE GENRES! <3
Production Genius
Dub, Ambient and Space Ambient, Eccojams, Organic House, Rare Phonk, Hard Drum, New Beat, Glitch Hop, Ballroom, Harsh Noise Wall
Rocking (not just the Casbah)
Ethereal Wave, Latin Alternative, Post-Punk, Freakbeat, Shoegaze, 2-Tone, Dance-Punk
Classical Reimagined
Tone Poem, New Complexity, Indeterminacy
Jazz Advancement
Resurfacing Pop
Yé-yé (France), Vanguarda paulista (Brazil), Chamber Pop, Alt-Pop
and
In exploring these genres once more today, I tuned into a dub album I hadn’t heard, removed a few decades from King Tubby’s early leaps through sonic futurism. The plainspoken naming of Rhythm & Sound’s “With the Artists” lays out their dedication to experimentation, with lyrics as evocative as the warping basslines that snake in and out—“Go away, you old vampire,” Jennifer Lara of “Queen of my Empire” declares. “Jah Rule” moves like lightning in a bottle, carefully contained yet electrifying and somehow humbling to behold.