Tin Hat Trio

Cosa Brava is an experimental rock and free improvisation group formed in March 2008 in Oakland, California, by guitarist and composer Fred Frith (Henry Cow, Skeleton Crew, Naked City). All About Jazz described their sound as existing somewhere between folk, Celtic, modern chamber, Latin, funk, Eastern, and prog-rock. The quintet released Ragged Atlas (2010) and The Letter (2012) on Switzerland's Intakt Records, followed by Z Sides (2024). Its lineup draws together members of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum with longtime Frith collaborator Zeena Parkins.

Tigran Hamasyan is an Armenian jazz pianist, composer and vocalist, born in Gyumri in 1987, who won the Montreux Jazz Festival piano competition in 2003 and the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition in 2006. His music fuses American jazz with the scales and modalities of Armenian folk tradition, threaded with progressive-rock and metal-adjacent rhythmic drive across albums such as A Fable (2011), Mockroot (2015), An Ancient Observer (2017) and The Call Within (2020). Released variously on Verve, Nonesuch and Naïve, his playing pairs odd-metered, riff-like left-hand ostinatos with sacred Armenian melody, making him a lone outlier in this atlas of avant-metal.

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2 Foot Yard was a San Francisco/Oakland-based chamber-rock trio led by violinist-vocalist Carla Kihlstedt, alongside cellist-vocalist Marika Hughes and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily (drums, guitar). Functioning as a songwriting collective, the group blended chamber-music intimacy with rock and avant-pop, occupying "the fertile cracks between art song and pop song." It grew out of a solo album Kihlstedt released on Tzadik and released two records: the self-titled "2 Foot Yard" (Tzadik, 2003) and "Borrowed Arms" (self-released, 2008).

A San Diego collective mixing free-jazz horns (sax, tuba, French horn) and folk instrumentation (banjo, accordion) with noise-rock abrasion and beatnik-poetry vocals, resisting the 'metal band' label despite billing themselves as extreme. Press describes them as an unpredictable blend of free improvisation, algorithmic composition, and 'ancient campfire songs' colliding with shattered noise.

TDK are an avant-prog/jazz-metal band from Plovdiv, Bulgaria, self-styled as from the 'Separatist Republic of Dobrina,' blending psychedelic post-metal, free-jazz dissonance, noise and punk energy. Records like Uspeh (2019) and Nemesta (2023) mix spastic mathy technicality with hypnotic grooves and washed-out ambiance, augmented by saxophone, accordion and electric organ over largely Bulgarian-language lyrics.

SNAILFORCE! is the genre-hopping instrumental project of Greg Eldridge and Adam Stacey, based in Portland, Oregon, blending metal, Balkan, prog and other styles into what the band calls a "musical slime project." Adam Stacey is also known for recording with Estradasphere, Atomic Ape, Secret Chiefs 3, High Castle Teleorkestra and Igorrr. The band's debut, the two-track EP "Greg and Adam's Wilderness Adventure," was released on May 24, 2024, mixed and mastered by Justin Phelps at The Hallowed Halls, with a rotating cast of guest players on strings, horns, shamisen and more.

CKRAFT is a Paris-based jazz-metal quintet -- Charles Kieny (augmented accordion), Theo Nguyen Duc Long (tenor saxophone), Antoine Morisot (guitar), Marc Karapetian (bass), and William Bur (drums) -- whose members met studying at conservatories including Berklee and the Paris Conservatoire. Their albums Epic Discordant Vision (2022) and Uncommon Grounds (2025), the latter winner of the Audience Prize at the Triomphes du Metal Francais, fuse djent-adjacent metal heaviness with free-jazz improvisation and Gregorian-chant-derived medieval melody.

Nucleus Torn was a Swiss avant-folk/progressive-metal project founded in 1997 by multi-instrumentalist Fredy Schnyder, expanding into a chamber-metal ensemble with cello, violin, flute, and an array of folk instruments (hammered dulcimer, bouzouki, oud, bagpipes). Signed to Prophecy Productions from 2006, the band moved between folk-rock, 1970s progressive-rock homage, and extreme metal across a decade-plus discography, including a conceptual Nihil/Knell/Andromeda Awaiting trilogy. Active until 2015, the later lineup included Eluveitie's Anna Murphy.

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Coinmonster is a Pennsylvania/Ohio-border progressive-metal outfit (New Castle, PA, formed 1990) built around guitarist-vocalist Jon Reider's fusion chops — self-described 'avant-garde jazzcore' that threads Holdsworth/Herring-style jazz-rock guitar through off-kilter time signatures, with detours into banjo-and-brushes Americana on tracks like 'Wake Up Tilton.' Largely a private-press/regional act (The Schematic, 2000; Tilton Johnson, 2002) rather than a scene band, it's an outlier RYM-tagged avant-garde-metal entry with no documented ties to the wider atlas.

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Forgotten Silence is a long-running Czech experimental/progressive metal band from Rosice, near Brno, founded in 1993 and still active. Fronted by Krusty (bass, vocals) alongside guitarists Medvěd and Hyenik, keyboardist Marty, drummer Čepa, and vocalist Petr Ševčík, the band moved from a death-metal-with-art-rock foundation on early albums toward the fully genre-dissolving 2006 LP "Kro Ni Ka," a mostly-instrumental, spoken-word record blending prog, jazz, ambient and Eastern folk textures that won a Razor Award for album of the year. Seven studio albums deep (through 2023's "Vemork Konstrukt"), the band is consistently described by critics as defying genre classification.

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