The Andretti

Sydney-based seven-piece avant-garde act led by Michael Lira (formerly of Vicious Hairy Mary), fusing free jazz, swing, surf rock, carnival music and death metal into a B-movie/circus aesthetic often compared to Mr. Bungle and John Zorn's Naked City. Their second album, Brainwashing for Dirty Minds (Romero Records, 2012), layers brass and strings over rock instrumentation.

Traditionalists is a Secret Chiefs 3 satellite project led by Trey Spruance, pairing Estradasphere/Secret Chiefs 3 guitarist Jason Schimmel and violinist Timba Harris. Its sole album, Le Mani Destre Recise Degli Ultimi Uomini (2009, Web of Mimicry), is a soundtrack to an imaginary Italian giallo horror film, built from cues in the style of Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Stelvio Cipriani and Goblin.

Confusatron is a genre-hopping avant-garde metal band from Portland, Maine, active on and off since 2001 (a decade-plus hiatus ended with a 2019 return). Songs careen between jazz measures, surf-rock, prog-metal complexity, Italian-opera and Gilbert-and-Sullivan pastiche, and cow-punk within single tracks, drawing frequent press comparisons to Mr. Bungle.

Mondo Cane is Mike Patton's orchestral love letter to 1950s–60s Italian pop, assembled after his years living in Bologna: a 40-piece orchestra, 15-piece band, and choir behind Patton crooning Neapolitan standards and Ennio Morricone's 'Deep Down', released on his own Ipecac label in 2010. Co-produced and arranged with conductor Daniele Luppi, the recordings were stitched together from live European performances in 2007. It earns its place in an experimental metal atlas as the purest example of where the genre's members go when they leave metal entirely — the Faith No More and Mr. Bungle frontman trading screams for Morricone-era orchestration, and critics compared it favorably to Mr. Bungle's California.

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Don Salsa was an experimental avant-prog/avant-metal band formed in 1993 while its members were in high school in the South Bay region of Los Angeles, active until 1997. The band recorded a single album, 'Koolaide Moustache in Jonestown,' released May 21, 1997, recorded over nearly three years in a warehouse on a primitive digital multi-track recorder, with an opening track exceeding 30 minutes. Core members Tim Smolens and Jason Schimmel went on to form Estradasphere, and Schimmel later became a founding member of Atomic Ape and an active member of Secret Chiefs 3.

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Formed in Guadalajara in 2001 by composer Sandrushka Petrova, Descartes a Kant fuse noise rock, punk, surf, jazz, new wave, and shoegaze into what their own booking bio calls a theatrical 'punk cabaret' built around gas-masked, Dresden Dolls/Rocky Horror-inspired stagecraft. Their 2017 LP Victims of Love Propaganda was tracked by Steve Albini and drew the attention of Mike Patton and Dave Lombardo, who invited the band to open Dead Cross's debut tour.

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I.S.S. (Ideal Social Situation) is a largely studio-based, self-described 'time-warping boy band' led by vocalist, songwriter, producer and bassist Tim Smolens, best known as the bassist of the genre-hopping Santa Cruz band Estradasphere. Built around four-part vocal harmonies drawing on 1950s barbershop quartet and doo-wop styles and Pet Sounds/Smile-era Beach Boys, the project blends homage and parody of the boy-band tradition. The core quartet of Smolens, Joey Ryken, Joel Robinow and George Smith is aided by guests including Estradasphere's Timba Harris and John Whooley and Mr. Bungle's Bar McKinnon. Its debut Forget About the Girl was released in 2002 on Mimicry Records, followed by She's A Girl in 2018.

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Celebrity Sex Scandal is an avant-garde metal band from San Antonio, Texas, formed in 2011 by guitarist Greg Combs after the dissolution of Dog Fashion Disco, effectively continuing that band's eclectic funk/ska/metal/pop hybrid with a horn section. Debut album Derivative (2013) was Kickstarter-funded, followed by Integral (2015), The Fundamental (2020) — which featured Dog Fashion Disco alumni John Ensminger and Jeff Siegel — and Convergence of Infinite Sequences (2023) on Razor To Wrist Records.

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Formed in Eureka, California in 1985, Mr. Bungle is the ur-text of genre-whiplash metal: a band that mutated from death/thrash demos into carnival-mirror avant-rock, cycling through heavy metal, avant-garde jazz, ska, disco and funk — often inside a single song — under Mike Patton's shape-shifting vocals. The core trio of Patton, guitarist Trey Spruance and bassist Trevor Dunn cut three Warner Bros. albums (Mr. Bungle 1991, Disco Volante 1995, California 1999) before splintering into half the projects in this atlas. In 2020 they reunited as a thrash unit with Dave Lombardo and Scott Ian to re-record their 1986 demo as The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo on Patton's Ipecac label.

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High Castle Teleorkestra is a remote avant-fusion "supergroup" assembled during the pandemic by Estradasphere alumni Tim Smolens and guitarist Chris Bogen, with members scattered across the US, Norway, Australia and France. Their 2022 debut, "The Egg That Never Opened" (released on Art As Catharsis), retells Philip K. Dick's "Radio Free Albemuth" through a cacophonous fusion of Eastern European folk, swing jazz, exotica and technical metal. The lineup draws on Estradasphere, Mr. Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3, Farmers Market and Umlaut.