'Experimental' Bands // p 3 of 3

Sun Speak

SUN SPEAK is Matt Gold (guitar) and Nate Friedman (drums). SUN SPEAK performs original works of electric chamber music and is based in Chicago, IL.

The Court & Spark

The Court & Spark was a San Francisco-based indie rock band formed in the spring of 1998 by Scott Hirsch, Alex Stimmel, James Kim, and lead vocalist M.C. Taylor. Between 1998 and 2001 the group was part of the alt-country Americana scene.

History

Hirsch and Taylor had previously been members of a band called Ex-Ignota, before moving to San Francisco and forming the country-oriented group, which released their debut album Ventura Whites on Tumult Records in 1999.

In 2001 the band released Bless You, which also featured pedal steel player Tom Heyman and vocalist Wendy Allen, as well as Gene Parsons, formerly of The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers. A review in Pitchfork by Christopher F. Schiel gave the album a score of 9.0, later downgraded to 8.4, and the album was also featured on NPR's All Things Considered by Sarah Bardeen in December 2001.

The band returned in 2004 with Witch Season and the Dead Diamond River EP, featuring contributions from Linda Thompson and M. Ward.

The Court & Spark disbanded in the summer of 2007 with an announcement on the band's website: "It's hard to say that The C&S is breaking up, as we still spend all our time together, but seeing as how we're all involved in different musical projects, it seems best to retire the C&S name for a while. We've had a good run and have had the good fortune to meet all kinds of wonderful souls as we've stumbled down the road. Thank you one and all for everything you've given us."

Taylor and Hirsch moved to the East Coast—Taylor to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Hirsch to New York City—and started a new project together called Hiss Golden Messenger which has released seven albums.

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Tricky

Adrian Nicholas Matthews Thaws (born 27 January 1968), better known by his stage name Tricky, is an English record producer and rapper. Born and raised in Bristol, he began his career as an early collaborator of Massive Attack before embarking on a solo career with his debut album, Maxinquaye, in 1995. The release won Tricky popular acclaim and marked the beginning of a lengthy collaborative partnership with vocalist Martina Topley-Bird. He released four more studio albums before the end of the decade, including Pre-Millennium Tension and the pseudonymous Nearly God, both in 1996. He has gone on to release eight studio albums since 2000, most recently Ununiform (2017).

Tricky is a pioneer of trip hop music, and his work is noted for its dark, layered musical style that blends disparate cultural influences and genres, including hip hop, alternative rock and ragga. He has collaborated with a wide range of artists over the course of his career, including Terry Hall, Björk, Gravediggaz, Grace Jones, and PJ Harvey.

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Underworld

Underworld are a British electronic music group formed in 1980 in Cardiff, Wales and the principal name of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith recording together. Prominent former members include Darren Emerson, from 1991 to 2001, and Darren Price, as part of the live band from 2005 to 2016.

After briefly performing as a funk and synth-pop outfit, resulting in two albums between 1988 and 1989, Underworld gained prominence after reshaping into a trance and techno band, releasing albums including Dubnobasswithmyheadman (1994), Second Toughest in the Infants (1996) and Beaucoup Fish (1998), as well as singles "Born Slippy .NUXX" and "Dark & Long (Dark Train)". Known for their atmospheric, progressive compositions, Hyde's cryptic lyrics, and dynamic live performances, Underworld have influenced a wide range of artists and have been featured in soundtracks and scores for films, television, and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

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Weyes Blood

Natalie Laura Mering (born June 11, 1988), known professionally as Weyes Blood (pronounced /waɪzblʌd/), is an American singer, songwriter, and musician. She was primarily raised in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. She has been performing her own material under variations of the name Weyes Blood since 2003.

Her music has undergone significant changes throughout her career. She has been involved in the underground noise music scene and was briefly bassist of the Portland, Oregon-based group Jackie-O Motherfucker and was singer for the band Satanized. As Weyes Bluhd she made two self-released albums, changing to Weyes Blood to release The Outside Room (2011) on microlabel Not Not Fun Records. She then signed with independent label Mexican Summer, releasing The Innocents (2014) and Front Row Seat to Earth (2016). She released her latest studio album, Titanic Rising (2019) on Sub Pop, to critical acclaim.

Natalie Laura Mering was born on June 11, 1988 in Santa Monica, California, into a deeply religious born again Pentecostal Christian family. Commenting on her upbringing, Mering said: "I was raised in a real spiritual, Bible Belt household. So I developed my own cynicism because there are always things in the Bible that really bum me out.... I became really obsessed with the Kids in the Hall as a kid, and they had Scott Thompson, who's like the one gay member. I remember having this feeling that 'Oh, Scott Thompson isn't going to heaven? How could that be?' That was my first big tipoff that something wasn't quite right with dogmatic Christianity. And then I was just trying to undo it at the age of 12."

Mering's family moved several times throughout her childhood; she spent her early life in Scotts Valley, California before they settled in Doylestown, Pennsylvania in 1999, where she attended high school. Both her older brothers and parents are musicians and music played an important part in her upbringing. Her father, Sumner Mering, is a musician and guitarist who was in a Los Angeles new wave band entitled Sumner in the late 1970s.

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Yo La Tengo

Yo La Tengo (Spanish for "I've got it"; also abbreviated as YLT) is an American indie rock band formed in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1984. Since 1992, the lineup has consisted of Ira Kaplan (guitars, piano, vocals), Georgia Hubley (drums, piano, vocals), and James McNew (bass, vocals). In 2015, original guitarist Dave Schramm rejoined the band and appears on their fourteenth album, Stuff Like That There.

Despite achieving limited mainstream success, Yo La Tengo has been called "the quintessential critics' band" and maintains a strong cult following. Though they mostly play original material, the band performs a wide repertoire of cover songs both in live performance and on record.

History

Formation and early history, 1984–1985

Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley formed the band as a couple in 1984. They chose the name Yo La Tengo, Spanish for "I have it". The name came from a baseball anecdote that occurred during the 1962 season, when New York Mets center fielder Richie Ashburn and shortstop Elio Chacón found themselves colliding in the outfield. When Ashburn went for a catch, he would scream, "I got it! I got it!" only to run into Chacón, a Venezuelan who spoke only Spanish. Ashburn learned to yell, "Yo la tengo! Yo la tengo!" instead. In a later game, Ashburn happily saw Chacón backing off. He relaxed, positioned himself to catch the ball, and was instead run over by left fielder Frank Thomas, who understood no Spanish and had missed a team meeting that proposed using the words "Yo la tengo!" as a way to avoid outfield collisions. After getting up, Thomas asked Ashburn, "What the hell is a yellow tango?"

Kaplan and Hubley placed an advertisement to recruit other musicians who shared their love for bands such as the Soft Boys, Mission of Burma, and Arthur Lee's Love. The group's debut recording was a 7" single entitled "The River of Water" backed with a cover of Lee's "A House Is Not a Motel", released in late 1985 with Dave Schramm on lead guitar and Dave Rick on bass. After recording "Private Doberman" for inclusion on a Coyote Records compilation entitled Luxury Condos Coming to Your Neighborhood Soon, Rick left the band and was replaced by Mike Lewis, the founding bass player of Boston garage-punk bands DMZ and Lyres, who was also a member of Brooklyn garage rock band the A-Bones throughout his tenure in YLT.

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Yves Tumor

Sean Lee Bowie, best known by the recording alias Yves Tumor, is an American musician and producer of experimental music, born in Miami, Florida and currently based in Turin, Italy.

To date, they have released five studio albums: When Man Fails You (2015), Serpent Music (2016), Safe in the Hands of Love (2018), Heaven to a Tortured Mind (2020), and Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) (2023).

Life and career
Raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, Tumor started making music at age 16 as an outlet away from "dull, conservative surroundings." They taught themself to play drums, bass, guitar, and keyboards. Describing their experience growing up in Tennessee as unpleasant, Yves moved at age 20 to San Diego, and then after college, to Los Angeles. They met Mykki Blanco in 2012, later touring for two and a half years throughout Europe and Asia.

In the early 2010s, Tumor recorded as Teams, and made music which AllMusic described as "post-chillwave". They debuted the Yves Tumor project in 2015 with an EP for Berlin's experimental club label Janus, and another one for Blanco's label, Dogfood MG. That same year, they released their first album, When Man Fails You (which would later be re-released by Apothecary Compositions on April 29, 2016).

In September 2016, Tumor signed with PAN Records and released their label debut, Serpent Music. Yves had worked on the album for three years after moving to Leipzig, Germany. The album was recorded between Miami, Leipzig, Los Angeles and Berlin. In Pitchfork's review of the album, critic Andy Beta compared Tumor's musical style to James Ferraro and Dean Blunt, and noted their use of "unsettling percussive loops and field recordings to create a mood as if lost in a strange urban landscape."

In September 2017, Tumor released a compilation album titled Experiencing the Deposit of Faith for free. Later that week, it was revealed through a tour announcement that Tumor had signed to Warp Records. Following the announcement, the artist embarked on a tour with a new audiovisual show.

In September 2018, Tumor released their Warp debut, Safe in the Hands of Love, with no prior announcement. It was preceded by the singles "Noid" on July 24, "Licking an Orchid" featuring James K on August 29, and "Lifetime" on September 3. The album received universal acclaim from music critics. Pitchfork's Jayson Greene stated in the review that the album "dwarfs everything the artist has released by several orders of magnitude. The leap is so audacious it's disorienting."

Tumor's fourth album, Heaven to a Tortured Mind, was released on April 3, 2020, preceded on March 3 by the single "Kerosene" featuring Diana Gordon. Alexis Petridis, reviewing the album for The Guardian, awarded it Album of the Week, describing it as "extraordinary: experimental, capable of any genre, with an internal logic powering its shifts in mood. There’s real skill involved in coming up with something that sounds coherent while shifting through so many styles.”

In October 2020, Tumor said in an interview with Michèle Lamy " I have another EP and a whole album basically not finished, but ready to start finishing. I’ve been very busy during the quarantine." In December 2020, Tumor released the single "let all the poisons that lurk in the mud seep out" in collaboration with Kelsey Lu, featuring Kelly Moran and Moses Boyd. In July 2021, they released the EP The Asymptotical World, recorded in collaboration with their bandmates, Chris Greatti and Yves Rothman.

In February 2023, Tumor was interviewed by Courtney Love for Interview magazine, in which they briefly hinted at an upcoming album. Shortly after, in March 2023, Tumor released their fifth album, "Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)", critically acclaimed as an ambitious, "ecstatic fusion of alt-rock and R&B", "spellbinding art rock", and a "Romantic, corporeal, gothy" offering that disrupts "hierarchies of gender, race, desire...and performance" via its "intense magnification and worship of life, death and spirituality." Tumor was part of the Coachella 2023 lineup.

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