Experimental

Experimental is not a genre in itself. Being experimental is the fundamental force of different art forms. Especially in music, being experimental means pushing boundaries or overcoming norms to create something new. You could say that the experimental part of music production is the reason why we have so many genres.

Especially electronic music can be described as experimental because it basically started in the lab, with pioneers like Karlheinz Stockhausen at one of the world's first electronic music studios (WDR Studio für elektronische Musik), and Wendy Carlos, Daphne Oram and Pierre Schaeffer. All of them pushed the boundaries of conventional work with music and found ways to replicate it with electricity.

The experimenting never left music. In the 90s, labels like Warp, Tresor and Mille Plateaux did a lot to give the category some shape, putting out records by Aphex Twin, Gas, Pole and Oval that refused to sit neatly anywhere else. What connects them is less a sound than an attitude - a willingness to treat rhythm, texture and structure as open questions rather than settled conventions.

In concrete terms, a record filed here might do almost anything: sub-bass pressure with no kick drum, field recordings dropped into a four-four grid and left to destabilise it, synthesiser drones that stretch across the full side of a record, or rhythms that feel almost functional until they quietly break apart. The unifying thread is that the decisions feel considered rather than accidental. Good experimental music rewards a proper system - the details that seem incidental on headphones often turn out to be the whole point when you hear them loud and in a room.

At SEVEN we love experimental stuff. Be bold, be creative, be experimental.