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The Conjuration is the solo outlet of Danville, Virginia's Corey Jason Cochran, running since around 2010 through albums like Gospel and the sprawling 2.5-hour The Trip (2025). Cochran writes, plays and produces everything himself, ping-ponging within single songs between tech-death riffing, metalcore breakdowns, jazz-fusion detours, industrial electronics and spoken-word skits. Reviewers have called it an unfiltered 'primordial soup' of ideas.

Umbah is the solo avant-garde industrial death metal/cybergrind project of UK multi-instrumentalist Cal Scott (formerly guitarist of grind act Necrosanct), running since 1990 and released largely through I, Voidhanger Records. Extremely prolific (dozens of albums across sci-fi/absurdist concept releases like 'Continuum,' 'Xominod,' and 'Obliticus'), the project fuses industrial death/grind with harsh electronics and jazz-tinged arrangements into what reviewers call 'techno-organic metal.'

A Northern California one-man band whose 'Never Was' (2024) and 'Shriek' (Lou Kelly...and Friends) LPs bounce between jazzcore, mathcore, grindcore, crust punk and harsh-noise-wall under a self-described 'Progressive-Violence-Jazz' banner, all written, performed and produced solo. The 'Shriek' record began as a drunken online invitation for strangers to sing over Kelly's instrumentals and grew into a 14-track collaborative curio on the tiny label THE HILLS ARE DEAD Records. Listeners have likened the results to a heavier Mr. Bungle/Mike Patton side-project, though that is a stylistic comparison only — no verified personal connection exists.

Ottone Pesante is an Italian instrumental trio from Faenza billing itself as the first 'brassmetal' band, replacing guitars with electronically processed trumpet and trombone over grindcore-rooted drums. Their 2024 album Scrolls of War (Aural Music) featured guest spots from Napalm Death's Shane Embury, Cattle Decapitation's Travis Ryan, Messa's Sara Bianchini, and ambient artist Lili Refrain. Reviewers describe their sound as 'jazz-infused metal and noise' that blends small-town brass-band bombast with extreme-metal intensity.

Black Bells of Destructionplay in the dock

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Whourkr was a Paris-based experimental death metal/grindcore project active 2005-2013, the vehicle where Gautier Serre (Igorrr) first fused blast-beat death metal with breakcore and glitch editing on guitars and programming. Vocalists cycled through the lineup: Laurent Lunoir (who records solo as Öxxö Xööx, 2005-2007), Yann Coppier as -i snor (2007-2011), and Mulk (2011-2013). Reviewers describe Concrete (2008) as throwing 'death metal, grindcore, jazz, opera, glitch, and breakcore into a meat grinder,' with blastbeats processed to resemble 'ten CDs all skipping simultaneously.' The project is widely regarded as the direct prototype for Serre's better-known solo project Igorrr.

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Hunab Ku was a Seattle avant-garde metal act built around vocalist Mike Gilmore, guitarist Luke Jaeger (ex-Sleep Terror, joined 2008 replacing founding guitarist Dan Hagerty), bassist Matt Finn, and drummer Mark Villano. Their 2007 debut "The Gaze Inward" (Black Sheep Records) was reviewed as chaotic mathcore-indebted avant metal, drawing explicit critical comparisons to Dillinger Escape Plan, Cephalic Carnage, and Fantomas, with vocals ranging from screams to croons and moans. IMPORTANT DISAMBIGUATION: this is distinct from an unrelated Costa Rican black metal band of the same name (founded 2016 by Lord Eythraz) and a dark-ambient project — the Seattle act is the one matching the chart description and reviews cited here.

Pecking Out My Stained Glass Eyesplay in the dock

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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.

Painkiller (stylized PainKiller) is an avant-garde trio formed in 1991 by John Zorn (saxophone), Bill Laswell (bass) and Mick Harris (drums), the latter fresh from grindcore pioneers Napalm Death. Their early records Guts of a Virgin (1991) and Buried Secrets (1992) fused blast-beat grindcore with free jazz, while the 1994 double album Execution Ground steered the group toward dub and ambient textures. After Harris left in 1995 to focus on electronic music, Zorn and Laswell continued Painkiller with drummers including Tatsuya Yoshida of Ruins, and the original trio reunited in 2024 with Harris on electronics.

Car Bomb is an American mathcore band from Rockville Centre, Long Island, New York, formed in 2000 from the merger of two local groups, Neck and Spooge. The quartet is known for a harsh, glitch-heavy and disorienting take on metal built on stop-on-a-dime tempo shifts and discordant riffing. After a 2007 Relapse Records debut, the band self-released the albums Meta (2016) and Mordial (2019), with Meta produced by Gojira frontman Joe Duplantier.

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Praxis is producer/bassist Bill Laswell's shape-shifting experimental project, built around a core trio of Laswell, guitarist Buckethead and drummer Brain (Bryan Mantia) that fuses funk, jazz, hip-hop, dub and heavy metal into highly improvised music. The 1992 debut Transmutation (Mutatis Mutandis) drew in P-Funk's Bernie Worrell and Bootsy Collins, while the harsher 1993/94 album Sacrifist added John Zorn on saxophone and ex-Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris of Painkiller, plus vocalist Yamatsuka Eye. The result swings between noisy speed metal, dub and turntablist collage.