Gematria

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.

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Venezuelan-born instrumental guitarist known for playing two self-designed 14- and 16-string guitars simultaneously, tapping both necks to emulate two guitarists at once. Signed to Prosthetic Records, his 2013 debut The Scenic Album is a trio recording with bassist Nathan Navarro and drummer Marco Minnemann, fusing progressive-metal technicality with jazz-fusion vocabulary and a tapping technique inspired by Venezuelan traditional ensemble music.

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.

Steve Blanco is the bassist and keyboardist of New York avant-garde metal act Imperial Triumphant, but his solo catalog runs on piano: the jazz-rooted Steve Blanco Trio records (Contact, Piano Warrior) gave way to increasingly extreme solo works like Misztikus and 2026's Shadow Arc Suite. The latter pairs virtuosic, Coltrane-indebted improvisation and modernist/serialist piano writing with programmed blast beats, atonal guitar, and ambient textures — an 'extreme ensemble' piece dragging free jazz and metal violence into the same room.

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.

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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.

Bay Area funk-metal vehicle formed in 1993 by Primus drummer Tim 'Herb' Alexander during a break from that band, pairing his drums (and eventually lead vocals) with Tom Butler's guitar and Ian Varriale's Chapman Stick/Warr guitar. Two albums, Blacktongue (1994) and Motivator (1999, Rinse-N-Repent Records), trade on the same proggy, slap-and-stick alt-metal chops Alexander brought to Primus. A minor node whose interest for the atlas is almost entirely its direct Primus lineage rather than any genre-scrambling ambition of its own.

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Dysrhythmia is an instrumental progressive/technical metal trio formed in Philadelphia in 1998 by guitarist Kevin Hufnagel and drummer Jeff Eber, now based in Brooklyn. Bassist Colin Marston — also of Krallice, Behold...The Arctopus, and the reunited Gorguts — joined in 2004, and the band's eight studio albums fuse jazz-inflected chord work, technical/progressive-death riffing, and prog-rock structure into a wordless, largely live-tracked instrumental attack.

Titan to Tachyons is a New York instrumental quartet led by guitarist Sally Gates, built around a two-bassist frontline (Trevor Dunn and Matt Hollenberg) with drummer Kenny Grohowski, fusing free-jazz improv, prog counterpoint, and metal violence into sci-fi-themed instrumentals. Their 2022 album Vonals was released on John Zorn's Tzadik label (following 2020's Cactides on Nefarious Industries), and the polyrhythmic, two-bass arrangement gives the compositions an unusually dense, contrapuntal low end. Every member's other credits (Mr. Bungle, Fantômas, Tomahawk, Secret Chiefs 3, Cleric, Imperial Triumphant) wire this band into the Zorn/downtown-jazz and Patton-adjacent avant-metal orbit.

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One-man Vienna-based experimental progressive metal project helmed by David Angerer, whose 2026 album Palingenaeon plays like 'a film score at a party' -- neoclassical/symphonic prog metal stitched together with circus music, absurdist black comedy, and a loose concept about botched reincarnation. Extremely new and thinly documented outside a handful of prog/metal press write-ups.