​Amnesty International Go, Go! Viral musical talents bring brains and smarts back to social media | Experimental music

CHloj Sobek is a Melbourne musician who plays the violin, a Renaissance precursor to the double bass. But instead of playing in the traditional way, she places wobbly pieces of cardboard between her strings or uses a lamb bone as a bow, and these bizarre interventions have become catnip for the Instagram algorithm, garnering tens of thousands — and sometimes hundreds of thousands — of views for each of the performance videos she makes herself. “Despite what it may seem, I’m a fairly shy person,” she says.

When Laurie Anderson’s minimalist opus Oh Superman hit number two in the UK charts in 1981, thanks to continued airplay on John Peel’s radio show, it was a sign of a media outlet’s ability to push experimental music into the mainstream. Now it’s happening again, as ready-made instrumentalists like Sobek, as well as experimental pianists, microtonal singers and many other boundary-pushing soloists, routinely emerge from underground circles thanks to videos — generally self-recorded at home — that go viral on TikTok and Instagram.

You may have come across a cover of a Mitski song played on a sinister microtonal scale, or a piano piece where the player frantically draws a circle across the piano keys, or in the case of Brad Barr, a tense drone made by Barr as he drags a long piece of polyester through the strings of his guitar. All of this suggests that the general public is actually more receptive to weird music than many assume – but why does it resonate so strongly?

The success of these bedroom virtuosos is already spilling over into the real world: After attracting millions of viewers to her expressive piano and synthesizer solos, Arkansas musician (and part-time piano teacher) Precious Renee Tucker was recently invited to perform for her hero Solange Knowles. “I’m definitely still processing everything,” she says. Her TikTok is a messy digital sketchbook of her ongoing friendship with the piano, captioned with enthusiastic exclamations like “I don’t know!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” “Music is a fabric!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” “I always release things without thinking twice about the need to understand them,” she says. “It’s really these parts of myself.”

Other experimental artists, like Maddy Ashman and Brian Dyster, attract TikTok users with micromusic, which is essentially a big wilderness of dissonant notes hidden among the standard Western musical scale. “This blows my mind, it’s as if we live in a musical matrix of prescribed sounds that are considered ‘consent,'” reads a comment under one of Ashman’s songs.

“It’s a lot of fun,” says Ashman, a British musician who makes microtonal pop music filled with strange harmonies and unpredictable vocal overlaps — a technique with interwoven melodic lines — reminiscent of that great hero of the avant-garde, Meredith Monk. “I feel happy when I move between places, approaching one instrument in the same way I approach another.” During her four-year ascension on short-form video platforms, which culminated in the release of her first EP last week, she has embraced the subtle beat style because it’s something few artists can do. “For a lot of people, their experience with micromusic is not being able to play it, and that’s painful.”

In her videos, Ashman relies on the element of surprise, starting by playing the exact tonal scale raw, then pulling a trick song out of it. “I suppose this works well for the algorithm, because people have expectations of what it will be like,” she posits. “Then we challenge those expectations, and people feel something.”

However, like Anderson’s chart success, these musicians are as divisive as they are iconic. Each video is guaranteed to have its share of critics, who question the authenticity of the music. “People start getting into arguments over the comment thread,” Sobeck says, and in her case, people often show interest in her instrument. “Because it’s this beautiful Renaissance instrument, and I seem to be attacking it, people wonder: How can you do that?” But the way I play is actually very nice if you see it in person. I’m saying these old machines shouldn’t be behind glass. In a way, I bring them back to life more than someone stuck trying to repeat history.

This provocation means that Sobek stands out on social media, an attention economy where every comment – ​​positive or negative – is registered as a post; At the same time, mainstream musicians such as Rosalía and Jacob Collier have sparked interest in classical performance and music theory in recent years. But the success of Sobek, Ashman et al. It’s mostly because of genuine excitement from people who have become numb to boring influencer culture and the brilliance of AI. “We really wanted something completely new, or at least to be inspired to have that perspective,” Tucker says. “To let go of the past, to break away from what we saw before, and to have the courage to do something creative that didn’t exist yet.”

In a roundabout way, it’s a reconnection with the goal of experimental art: to provoke and gauge reactions by bending invisible rules. “This is my favorite part about the experimental field,” Tucker says with a smile. “I’m not necessarily saying the way I play is correct or the standard. I really like the conversations that come up: Is this acceptable? Does this feel good? What is this?” She compares the process to a laboratory full of scientists comparing notes.

However, some of the comments under the artists’ videos veer into misogyny. “There’s definitely an element of being a woman doing something challenging,” Sobeck says. “I encounter a lot of men who have strong reactions, and I wonder, would it be different if I were a man? Would it be a little more acceptable?” Ashman sees a similar pattern of self-elected male pundits questioning the “fine tune” of her music, but she says, “We’re now in a society where the majority of people can laugh at it instead of get hurt a lot, which is an amazing thing to be able to say.”

For all their online success, these artists are also concerned about appeasing the social media algorithms that promoted their videos in the first place. “Can I keep the same mindset of doing this for fun? Can I take a break, or do I need to keep working and moving forward regardless?” Tucker questions.

“There were always gatekeepers,” Sobeck says. “We think the Internet has democratized things, but it’s still determined by a gatekeeping algorithm. It’s all the same thing.”

Not only does this create pressure to post regularly, but a short video can distort the idea of ​​what experimental art actually is, in the eyes of those who have just discovered it via an algorithm. “It reinforces the idea of ​​spectacle, and I don’t think art is just about display,” Sobeck says. “I’m going to post a video that’s more musically serious and won’t get as much attention as the fun and crazy stuff.”

But short video also offers new ways of self-expression — you can see it in the overlapping words that come down the stairs behind Ashman in her videos, or how each of Tucker’s flowing clips add up to a unique body of work — that is art in a unique public dialogue with its audience. “It’s amazing that so many people are willing to be in this unknown place, and not get such an instant answer in such a live digital space where you can get every kind of psychedelic you want,” Tucker says. “I’m proud of all of us for having the courage to go there.”