Ruins

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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Upsilon Acrux is an American avant-progressive / math rock band founded in 1998 by guitarist Paul Lai, who started the group near San Diego before relocating to Los Angeles. Built on interlocking twin-guitar counterpoint, odd meters and a frequently rotating cast of players around Lai as the sole constant, they trade in a dense, athletic, largely instrumental 'brutal prog' indebted to King Crimson and Japanese noise-rock forebears like Ruins. They released their most widely heard albums, Galapagos Momentum (2007) and Radian Futura (2009), on the Maryland avant-rock label Cuneiform Records.

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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.

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Electrocution 250 was a short-lived instrumental trio from Minnesota — guitarist Todd Duane, keyboardist Lalle Larsson, and drummer Peter Wildoer — who recorded a single album, 'Electric Cartoon Music From Hell' (2003/2004), fusing jazz-fusion virtuosity with Carl Stalling-style cartoon-music motifs and occasional thrash-metal bombast. Larsson and Wildoer are separately known for progressive/metal session and band work (Karmakanic, Darkane, among others), but this project stands as a standalone one-off. It is unrelated to the atlas's Ulver electronic era.

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Black Heart Sutra is a New York experimental/mathcore project centered on composer-violinist Earl Maneein (SEVEN)SUNS) and drummer Kenny Grohowski (Imperial Triumphant, Secret Chiefs 3, frequent John Zorn collaborator), expanded on record with guest vocalists including Jessica Pimentel. Their 2017 debut album "Zersetzung" (Still Water Recordings) mixes progressive-jazz harmony with mathcore's chaotic, Locust-like structural shifts.

The Transitioningplay in the dock

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Mattias 'IA' Eklundh is a Swedish guitarist, vocalist, and the founder of Gothenburg progressive/avant-garde metal band Freak Kitchen (1992-present), whose sound mixes heavy metal with gypsy-jazz-adjacent influences and absurdist humor. He is also a solo 'Freak Guitar' artist released on Steve Vai's Favored Nations label and named Frank Zappa as one of his two biggest musical influences, though no direct collaboration with Zappa, Mats/Morgan, or the Zorn/Secret Chiefs 3 circle was found.

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Deli Creeps is guitarist Buckethead's formative avant-garde/funk-metal band, formed in Claremont/San Francisco in the early 1990s and built around Maximum Bob's manic vocals and Buckethead's already-virtuosic, genre-hopping lead guitar. Their sole album, Dawn of the Deli Creeps (2005), compiles re-recorded demo-era material and functions as an origin document for Buckethead's later solo vocabulary — several of its riffs and songs were repurposed on his solo records. Mike Patton has praised the band, and it sits at the root of the Bay Area Buckethead/Praxis/Primus-adjacent avant-metal cluster.

Can I Have a Ride?play in the dock

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Peculate is the solo avant-garde/progressive metal project of American composer Ben Norton, self-releasing everything for free since 2012 under a self-styled 'Metal in Opposition' banner. Norton fuses djent and mathcore aggression with 12-tone technique, Zappa-esque jazz-fusion tangents and polished production, occasionally detouring into satirical protest-song territory (2015's viral 'This Sick Beat™'). It reads as a bedroom-scale answer to the Zorn/Zappa strand of metal-adjacent avant-composition.

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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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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.