Whether making microtonal pop or playing Renaissance instruments with sheep bones, a crop of bold artists are making genuinely strange music go mainstream – but are they at the mercy of the algorithm?
Chloë Sobek is a Melbourne musician who plays the violone, a Renaissance precursor to the double bass. But instead of playing it in the traditional manner, she puts wobbling bits of cardboard between its strings or uses a sheep’s bone as a bow, and these weird interventions have become catnip for Instagram’s algorithm, getting her tens of thousands – sometimes hundreds of thousands – of views for each of her self-made performance videos. “Despite how it might appear, I’m a reasonably shy person,” she says.
When Laurie Anderson’s robo-minimalist masterwork O Superman hit No 2 in the UK charts in 1981, thanks to incessant airplay on John Peel’s radio show, it was a signal of a media outlet’s power to propel experimental music into the mainstream. That’s now happening again as prepared-instrument players such as Sobek, plus experimental pianists, microtonal singers and numerous other boundary-pushing solo performers, are routinely breaking out of underground circles thanks to videos – generally self-recorded at home – going viral on TikTok and Instagram.
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