Unnatural Ways

Red Side Visible is a Cleveland/Akron, Ohio project built around multi-instrumentalist Tim Mirth, fusing odd-metered metal riffing with genuine free-jazz improvisation and alto saxophone. Press copy invokes Meshuggah, Mr. Bungle and Zappa as touchstones; the 2021 album 'A Break from Normality' collects material written and re-recorded across a decade since the project's 2010 debut 'Enter Entropy'.

Los Angeles metal-jazz quartet fronted by trumpeter Dan Rosenboom and guitarist Jake Vossler, pairing lyrical, Miles-Davis-lineage trumpet against Vossler's distorted, noise-inflected guitar over double bass and drums. Their 2017 debut Reclamation (Tzadik) was tracked in 72 hours as a politically charged 'jazz protest record,' moving between free improvisation, heavy thrash riffing, and balladic passages.

Cartel Carnage is a French quintet of jazz-scene musicians (guitar, bass, trumpet, tenor sax, drums) fusing free jazz, heavy metal, pop and progressive rock into what reviewers called a 'musical UFO.' Their sound and stated influences — Naked City, Fantomas, Mr. Bungle, Zorn, Ornette Coleman, alongside Meshuggah and Slayer — place them squarely in genre-collision RIO/avant-prog territory, though no sourced personnel or label ties connect them to the existing atlas. Their sole full-length, Incorporated, was released in 2012 on Great Winds/Musea Records.

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A short-lived 1990s Norwegian project that released two albums on Ironic Recordings — Sjelefred (1996) and Fun For All the Family (1997, produced by Helge Sten) — rooted more in punk and alternative metal than orthodox black or death metal, but stirring in jazz, 70s prog, dance and electronic influences via a rotating cast that included saxophone and trumpet players. Its genre-agnostic, eclectic approach later put it in the same critical orbit as Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Primus.

Lye by Mistake were an instrumentally virtuosic experimental metal band from St. Louis, Missouri, active 2004-2011, who moved from vocal mathcore on their 2006 debut Arrangements for Fulminating Vective to fully instrumental jazz-fusion metal on 2009's Fea Jur after vocalist Tony Saputo's 2008 departure. Reviewers likened their guitar work to jazz-fusion players like Pat Metheny and Al Di Meola grafted onto a Meshuggah-indebted metal chassis. They toured alongside mathcore-scene peers including Psyopus, The Number Twelve Looks Like You, Cattle Decapitation, and Arsonists Get All the Girls.

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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.

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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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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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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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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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