Brain Tentacles

An Oakland art-thrash unit fusing King Crimson-style tempo shifts and free-jazz saxophone skronk with Slayer-speed riffing, math-rock structure, and post-punk snarl. Signed to Crucial Blast for City of Dis (2005), critics placed them alongside Naked City and Yakuza for pushing metal and jazz into the same collapsing structure.

Long-running Indonesian band from Yogyakarta, formed 1998, that started as avant-garde/technical death metal and by their 2009 album 'Lipan's Kinetic' had shifted toward a free-jazz-influenced mathcore style, incorporating clean jazz guitar passages, electronic/dubstep digressions, and even a straight-faced Cure cover ('Friday I'm In Love') alongside brutal death metal riffing. Reviewers have likened the results to 'a collaboration between John Zorn and Melt-Banana' and to Psyopus-style mathcore fused with brutal death metal. Current lineup is Halim (guitars, since 1998), Mal (bass, since 2001), Didit (vocals, since 2002) and Obet (drums, since 2006).

A Mind-Expanding Headtripplay in the dock

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Trevor Dunn's Trio-Convulsant is the avant-garde jazz vehicle of Mr. Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn, active since 1997 and built on the idea of a compositional jazz trio that also wields rock's power chords — AllMusic called the result "moody jazz with convulsive rock." The group debuted with Debutantes & Centipedes (1998, Buzz Records) featuring guitarist Adam Levy and drummer Kenny Wollesen, then re-emerged on Ipecac with Sister Phantom Owl Fish (2004) in a new lineup with guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Ches Smith. That trio returned on Séances (2022, Pyroclastic Records), expanded by the chamber quartet Folie à Quatre — including Sleepytime Gorilla Museum violinist Carla Kihlstedt — for music inspired by the 18th-century French Convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard.

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Lye by Mistake were an instrumentally virtuosic experimental metal band from St. Louis, Missouri, active 2004-2011, who moved from vocal mathcore on their 2006 debut Arrangements for Fulminating Vective to fully instrumental jazz-fusion metal on 2009's Fea Jur after vocalist Tony Saputo's 2008 departure. Reviewers likened their guitar work to jazz-fusion players like Pat Metheny and Al Di Meola grafted onto a Meshuggah-indebted metal chassis. They toured alongside mathcore-scene peers including Psyopus, The Number Twelve Looks Like You, Cattle Decapitation, and Arsonists Get All the Girls.

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Agabas is a six-piece 'deathjazz' band formed in Trondheim, Norway, fusing death metal aggression with jazz harmony and improvisation, anchored by saxophonist Alexander Dellerhagen alongside a full metal rhythm section. Several members hold jazz performance master's degrees, and press coverage draws comparisons to Meshuggah, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and Gojira crossed with John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. The band signed to Mascot Records around their 2025 album Hard Anger.

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Killing Spree is a French avant-jazz/death-metal duo of saxophonist Matthieu Metzger (Klone, Orchestre National de Jazz) and drummer Grégoire Galichet (Deathcode Society, Kwoon), formed after the pair met on a tour of Japan. Their 2020 debut EP A Violent Legacy reworked Death and Meshuggah tracks through saturated free-jazz saxophone and talkbox, and their 2024 full-length Camouflage (Klonosphere/Season of Mist) pushes further into technical, hardcore-adjacent death-metal-via-jazz territory. Not to be confused with several unrelated straight thrash-metal bands of the same name.

Zu are an Italian avant-jazz/noise-metal trio formed in Ostia near Rome in 1997, built on the unconventional lineup of Luca T. Mai's baritone saxophone, Massimo Pupillo's bass and Jacopo Battaglia's drums. Their heaviest album, Carboniferous (2009), was their first release for Mike Patton's Ipecac Recordings. It features guest appearances by Mike Patton on vocals (notably on "Soulympics") and King Buzzo (Buzz Osborne) of the Melvins on guitar for "Chthonian."

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Brooklyn/NYC instrumental trio blending prog, jazz, and metal into knotty, polymetric compositions; began as an acoustic jazz unit before electrifying into an aggressive math-rock/tech-metal power trio. Drummer Jeff Eber doubles in Dysrhythmia, and the band's Cuneiform-era records were engineered by Dysrhythmia's Colin Marston, tying them into the Brooklyn tech-metal underground.

The Flying Luttenbachers are an American instrumental noise/avant-garde band formed in Chicago in 1991 and led throughout by composer-drummer Weasel Walter, who coined 'brutal prog' for their aggressively dissonant fusion of free jazz, no wave, punk and death metal. Over 20-plus albums and a rotating cast of 40+ Chicago-improv and avant players, they've morphed from punk-jazz trio to industrial sound-collage to a ferocious, hyper-technical metal-prog engine. The band dissolved in 2007 and reformed in 2017, remaining an uncompromising touchstone of extreme instrumental music.

Tear Light From Matter is a Massachusetts-based instrumental act pairing saxophone with a standard metal rhythm section, self-tagged on Bandcamp as experimental/jazz metal/fusion/prog metal. Their debut, "In Statu Nascendi" (released 25 January 2019, recorded and mixed by Jerry MacDonald at Odd Fellows Recording), sits alongside a further release, "Fœtal Præyers", in a small but pointed discography. The saxophone-led interplay places them in the lineage of jazz-inflected heavy bands rather than straightforward metal songwriting.