So glad I kept my CDs. If I’d gone 100 percent streaming, I’d probably never hear these albums again. Arrhythmia 1-3 are compilations from experimental San Francisco label Charnel Music.

Part of my always growing collection of music I can’t listen to with my wife around.

I got these back when I was into what I’ll call esoteric music. Avant Garde doesn’t quite do it. Not the museum crowd. More like the underground newspaper set. These are the kind of people who will kill themselves to make music few will like or understand.

Transcendence, by Voice of Eye, one of the songs I first fell in love with when I started to explore “esoteric” music. Strange but beautiful. It’s on Transmigration, an album about the soul’s journey after death. Inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

If you’re like I was, you might hate it at first. You might not even call it music. But then it clicks and you realize it came straight from the Beyond. Some artists have a muse that’s frightening until you figure out it’s beautiful. Cherubim and Seraphim.

The scene I’m talking about is a whole other underground world I discovered by accident. I was driving late at night on a Texas FM road at night, on the way to see my folks for the weekend, nothing good on the radio.

I got just enough signal from a station out of Houston to hear something so strange I wasn’t even sure it was music.

It didn’t even have a melody or a proper time signature, but whatever it was, it was tantalizing. I had to find out what it was. Before it faded away again I got the name: Voice of Eye – Ascension of Jolene. It took years to hunt it down.

That sent me down so many rabbit holes I almost forgot what normal people like any more. Esoteric, experimental, whatever you want to call it. It’s one of my main “genres” now.

#Charnel Music, #Esoteric, #Avant Garde, #Dark Ambient, #Experimental Music