Cartel Carnage
Cartel Carnage is a French quintet of jazz-scene musicians (guitar, bass, trumpet, tenor sax, drums) fusing free jazz, heavy metal, pop and progressive rock into what reviewers called a 'musical UFO.' Their sound and stated influences — Naked City, Fantomas, Mr. Bungle, Zorn, Ornette Coleman, alongside Meshuggah and Slayer — place them squarely in genre-collision RIO/avant-prog territory, though no sourced personnel or label ties connect them to the existing atlas. Their sole full-length, Incorporated, was released in 2012 on Great Winds/Musea Records.
SCORE PROFILE
Accent numbers counted towards the index. Hover an axis — or hold it on a phone — for what it means.
WHY THOSE SCORES
- Jazzy 7 — Founded by musicians from the French jazz scene; described as mixing 'free jazz, heavy-metal, pop and Progressive rock' with explicit Ornette Coleman/John Zorn influence and a horn section (trumpet, tenor sax) throughout Incorporated (https://cartelcarnage.bandcamp.com/album/incorporated).
- Technical 7 — ProgArchives classifies the act as RIO/Avant-Prog/Progressive Rock built by jazz-trained instrumentalists mixing metal, jazz and prog without stylistic borders (https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=39133; https://cartelcarnage.bandcamp.com/album/incorporated).
MEMBERS
- Fred Mauringuitar
- Alex Tomaszewskibass
- Sylvain Cathalatenor saxophone
- Sylvain Bardiautrumpets
- Eric Dambrindrums
FURTHER LISTENING
Nearest score profiles in the atlas.
- UnaffiliatedEI 8Burning GhostsJazzyTechnical
Los Angeles metal-jazz quartet fronted by trumpeter Dan Rosenboom and guitarist Jake Vossler, pairing lyrical, Miles-Davis-lineage trumpet against Vossler's distorted, noise-inflected guitar over double bass and drums. Their 2017 debut Reclamation (Tzadik) was tracked in 72 hours as a politically charged 'jazz protest record,' moving between free improvisation, heavy thrash riffing, and balladic passages.
- Dissonant tech-deathEI 11The Pitts Minnemann ProjectTechnicalJazzy
The Pitts Minnemann Project is an instrumental progressive-rock/jazz-fusion collaboration between keyboardist Jimmy Pitts (Scholomance) and drummer Marco Minnemann, joined by rotating guest virtuosi on guitar, bass, saxophone, and violin. They released two albums, '2 L 8 2 B Normal' (2014) and 'The Psychic Planetarium' (2016), both blending heavy fusion with progressive-metal complexity.
- UnaffiliatedEI 8Red Side VisibleJazzyTechnical
Red Side Visible is a Cleveland/Akron, Ohio project built around multi-instrumentalist Tim Mirth, fusing odd-metered metal riffing with genuine free-jazz improvisation and alto saxophone. Press copy invokes Meshuggah, Mr. Bungle and Zappa as touchstones; the 2021 album 'A Break from Normality' collects material written and re-recorded across a decade since the project's 2010 debut 'Enter Entropy'.
- Tool-verseEI 11Volto!JazzyTechnical
Volto! is an American jazz-fusion jam band based in Los Angeles, best known as the side project of Tool drummer Danny Carey. Formed in the early 2000s from improvised sessions with guitarist John Ziegler and bassist Lance Morrison at a San Fernando Valley jazz club, the group spent nearly a decade as a live-only act before releasing its debut album Incitare (2013) on Fantasy Records. Their heady, genre-spinning instrumental sound bridges King Crimson, Liquid Tension Experiment, and 1970s fusion, foregrounding the improvisation that Carey has cited as his main motivation for the project.
- UnaffiliatedEI 10Blind Idiot GodTechnicalJazzy
Blind Idiot God is an instrumental trio formed in 1982 in St. Louis, fusing noise rock, dub, funk, free jazz and metal; Greg Ginn signed them to SST Records after hearing their demo. Their 1988 album Undertow was produced by Bill Laswell and featured saxophonist John Zorn, and the full band performed on Laswell's Praxis album Sacrifist (1993) alongside Buckethead, Bootsy Collins and Yamatsuka Eye. Khanate drummer Tim Wyskida joined in 2001 and remains the band's drummer through their 2015 reunion album Before Ever After.
- Dissonant tech-deathEI 10ZeviousTechnicalJazzy
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.
- ZornEI 11Unnatural WaysJazzyTechnical
Unnatural Ways is guitarist/vocalist Ava Mendoza's power trio with bassist Tim Dahl and drummer Sam Ospovat, formed in 2012 and drawing on noise rock, free jazz and metal for a raw, heavy, unpredictable sound built around Mendoza's angular, distorted guitar work. The band's second album, We Aliens, came out on John Zorn's Tzadik label in 2016, and Mendoza herself has a deep pedigree in Zorn's orbit, having played his 1984 'game piece' Cobra and recorded in his Arcana series. She's also a recurring guest on saxophonist Jon Irabagon's improv-noise 'I Don't Hear Nothin' But the Blues' series alongside guitarist Mick Barr.
- UnaffiliatedEI 8Tear Light From MatterJazzyTechnical
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.
- UnaffiliatedEI 8Lye by MistakeTechnicalJazzy
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.
- UnaffiliatedEI 13ValtozashJazzyTechnical
Valtozash is a fifteen-to-seventeen-piece 'jazz-thrash-metal' big band out of Brisbane, Australia, led by composer and electric vibraphonist Andre Bonetti. A full horn section collides free-jazz harmony and improvisation with thrash-metal aggression, drawing press comparisons to a conducted orchestra 'brutally assaulting' jazz standards. Albums like Wizard-Bird (2017) and Boiling Solitude (2021) showcase the ensemble's scale, arranging dense big-band charts against metal riffing.