the limits of experimentalism
can someone explain to Lil' Yachty to me?
I’ve been thinking about the word experimental. It’s a term I’ve used to describe parts of my own work, sometimes proudly, sometimes sheepishly, and sometimes as a kind of shield. It’s a word that signals deviation from the norm, but also carries its own aesthetic weight—its own expectations, its own clichés. In music, especially, experimental tends to connote something dissonant, abstract, obscure, or uninviting. Something hard to understand. But lately I’ve been wondering if that’s the right way to frame it.
I’ve worked in both song-based and more abstract modes of music-making. I’ve produced traditional pop structures and I’ve composed long-form sound pieces with no rhythm or lyrics to hang onto. And in both cases, I’ve noticed something uneasy in myself: that I sometimes use “experimentalism” to create distance rather than intimacy. Not as a way of reaching out, but as a way of withholding.
And yet—I’m not interested in being against experimentalism. Quite the opposite. I think it’s an essential impulse. But I want to better understand what it’s doing in my work—and what it might be doing in the work of others.
The Invention of Experimental Music
The idea of experimental music has many histories. There’s the John Cage lineage, where chance and indeterminacy upend traditional authorship. There’s the mid-century tradition of extended techniques, alternative tunings, graphic scores, deep listening, noise, improvisation, and other challenges to Western musical grammar. There’s the academic lineage of electroacoustic composition, and the DIY lineage of tape collage and punk electronics. In each case, experimentalism usually means departure—from harmony, form, audience expectation, or some dominant stylistic paradigm.
But over time, these departures become canonized. Today, a piece made entirely of field recordings or tape hiss or dense clusters of random-seeming notes might read as “experimental” even if it feels entirely familiar to those within the genre. Experimentalism becomes a style, and with style comes legibility—too much legibility, maybe.
This codification of ‘the experimental’ reminds me of what Hal Foster called the expressive fallacy. In his 1983 essay of the same name, he writes about how the painterly gestures of abstract expressionism—once understood as raw, emotional, honest—have become codes for expression itself. They don’t express so much as perform the act of expression. The brushstroke becomes a stand-in for emotional authenticity, whether it’s sincere or not.
This feels relevant to music. The droning texture, the tape-warped piano, the slow-moving cluster chord—all of it can become shorthand for experimentation, for difficulty, for critical distance. Experimentalism, too, can become a code.
What It Feels Like to Not Understand
But there’s another side to this. I want to take seriously what it feels like to listen to something you don’t understand. That strange pleasure of sitting with sounds that offer no clear emotional arc, no verse or chorus to orient you, no lyrics to explain themselves. Sometimes the music feels opaque. But sometimes it just is, and that’s the whole point. There’s a kind of listening—let’s call it receptive rather than interpretive—that experimental music can uniquely support.
Instead of asking: What does this mean?, you’re asked to notice: What is happening? What do you feel, moment to moment, as tones emerge and dissipate? What sensations, memories, or moods are activated by the sheer physicality of sound?
In that light, experimentalism can be a kind of generosity. Not in the sense of accessibility, but in the sense of openness—a refusal to dictate meaning too quickly.
Still, there’s a flipside. Work that is open-ended can also be unmemorable. It risks emotional thinness. And if we’re being honest, there’s a way that some experimental work operates less like an invitation and more like a flex—a gesture of intelligence, density, or in-group knowledge that isn’t for the listener so much as performed in front of them.
I don’t think this is always a bad thing, but it’s worth recognizing.
The Experimental Within the Familiar
What complicates all this is that some of the most emotionally impactful music being made today is deeply experimental—just not in the ways we tend to recognize.
Great pop producers play with time, texture, phrasing, prosody, and space in ways that are wildly sophisticated. They embed dissonance, dynamic rupture, and formal surprise into otherwise traditional containers. They move a lyric by half a beat to increase its impact. They text-paint a phrase with a shift in vocal timbre. They bury chaos in polish. This is structural experimentation rather than aesthetic experimentation.
And that’s the key distinction I’m trying to pinpoint: experimentalism as style versus experimentalism as strategy.
Style is outward-facing. It shows itself. Strategy is inward-facing. It’s about method, process, and attention to form. You can make a three-minute pop song and still be working experimentally if you’re reinventing your own internal logic to make it.
Which means: experimentalism doesn’t belong to any particular genre. It’s not about sounding weird. It’s about thinking differently.
Rethinking the Dialectic
The traditional view holds that experimentalism and traditionalism are opposites. But I think they’re more like entwined histories—mutually evolving, borrowing from each other, changing shape.
A lot of what gets framed as “experimental” today is actually just codified postmodern style. Meanwhile, much of what’s framed as “traditional” is alive with subtle, rule-breaking invention.
Some of the most exciting experimentalism happening today lives not outside of pop, but deep within its architecture. Think of producers like Danny L Harle, who—on the Tape Notes podcast—speaks with reverence about Max Martin’s formal innovations: the way he bends structure, delays gratification, and modulates energy across a track like a kind of emotional choreography. Or consider how SOPHIE’s radical approach to sound design—sharp, synthetic, hyper-physical—has gone from fringe to foundational, reshaping the sonic palette of mainstream pop and club music alike. Even artists like Lil Yachty, whose recent psychedelic pivot felt more like a performance of genre than a genre itself, are experimenting not by rejecting pop language, but by bending it, exaggerating it, dragging it somewhere slightly uncanny. These are not “experimental” artists in the traditional sense, but they are experimenting with form, affect, and cultural signal in ways that feel genuinely new.
Maybe we’ve been thinking about this wrong. Maybe the most radical act isn’t to abandon tradition, but to renew it. Maybe the most challenging work isn’t obscure, but intimate. Maybe the experiment isn’t in the form—it’s in the risk of making contact.