September 5, 2012 – German splatter-composer Karlheinz Stockhausen saw no limits to what you could do (or reasonably should do) with sound, rhythm or texture; so he broke every rule and invented new ones over the course of a career that spanned more than 50 years. He'd make orchestras battle or compose for music boxes; he'd make manipulated tapes ooze into live instruments; he'd bring ring modulators into concert halls. His slurred tapes, synesthesia-inducing sounds, and expressionist bursts of percussion accidentally mirrored the effects of hallucinogenics; so, of course, he influenced everyone from the Beatles to The Who to Zappa to Miles Davis to Kraftwerk (former students!) to Björk to AnCo. Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: Studio Ghibli

September 5, 2012 – The O.G. for all aspiring curators/experimental filmmakers/found art collectors/misunderstood artists: Harry Smith did it all. His Anthology of American Folk Music, culled from his own hoarding of dusty 78s, brought the old weird America to the attention of new weird Americans like Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead. His hallucinogenic, Dizzy-Gillespie-tracked experimental animations predated the music video age by 30 years. His abstract art burst in geometric explosions. And, before his death in 1991, you could pop by his house and check out his collections of 30,000 Ukrainian Easter eggs, Seminole quilts, and paper airplanes he found floating in the New York City streets. Avey Tare: I appreciate him because of his Renaissance Man quality. Just being into things like collecting the eggs, the film stuff, the musical compilations. It's definitely awesome.

September 5, 2012 – Avey Tare: The whole thing was based on this winter taking over this town, all these different scenarios where people were falling into ice. Deakin: The way I came into thinking about [musique concrète] was by hearing the stuff they were doing. They did this 40-minute long piece that was just this symphony of sound. Like a sonically visual thing and it was kind of the first time I thought about the fact that I was listening to something with headphones with my eyes closed. I became aware of what sound was doing. I thank them for opening that for me. Geologist: Very Winesburg, Ohio," Sherwood Anderson, but a nightmare version. We would use samples and that would become part of the narrative. My wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, still has a cassette in her huge thing of dubbed cassettes from high school.

August 31, 2012 – Bristol duo Koan Sound is the latest bass cannonball fired from Skrillex's OWSLA label, and sure enough one of the funkiest things you'll hear this year outside of Mouse on tha Track or Antibalas. The grooves on their upcoming EP, The Adventures of Mr. Fox, are wide and lurching, obsessed with '80s exercise videos and retromaniacal drum sounds. Our favorite is "Eastern Thug," which has got the robot headbanger grooves of contemporaries like Skrillex and Kill The Noise, but with a distinctly '90s mosh pit feel — we're geeked on the piano lines straight outta Downward Spiral-era Nine Inch Nails and the sly build-ups of Prodigy's Music For the Jilted Generation. Gnarly!

August 29, 2012 – Yesterday, Gary Clark Jr. announced that he can boast something that Jay-Z, Pearl Jam, Skrillex, Drake and the rest of his Made In America festivalmates cannot — he gets to play both Saturday and Sunday. Gary Clark Jr.'s mix of Texas blues, sweltering hard rock, harder funk, and exploratory jammage could shake the moneymaker off of anyone. His virtuosic frenzy can follow Iron & Wine at Jazz Fest or precede Torche at Metallica's Orion with similar ease, which is why he's the king bee of the 2012 summer festival season. Clark explains how he earned SPIN's coveted Golden Corndog. Why am I on so many lineups? I'm honestly not sure. A lot of it has to do with my background: Austin, Texas, is kind of a nice little melting pot. Coachella, I was really excited to get to that one. The energy was just big.

August 28, 2012 – Liturgy, the sourpusses behind SPIN's favorite metal album of 2011, stopped by the offices of the Onion A/V Club to cover one of their favorite songs, Shellac's spiteful 2000 classic "Prayer to God" (one of SPIN's 33 Bitterest Songs Ever, natch). As witnessed at Metallica's Orion Festival, Liturgy has pared down from a burst-beating quartet to a two man guitarmy backed by an oppressively loud drum machine — maybe a Big Black song would have made more sense? Liturgy leader Hunter Hunt-Hendrix decided to take this one on alone, using nothing more than a microphone and his looptastic pedal chain. Watch this Reggie Watts-gone-Watain monstrosity below. The embedded video couldn't have said it better: "a delicious breakthrough in natural energy." OK, that line was technically in the Starbucks ad, but still.

August 21, 2012 – Noise-rock titans Lightning Bolt are finally returning after three years of silence with the Oblivion Hunter EP (out on September on Load, natch). The first taste, "King Candy," leaked today, and fans of the duo's particular breed of two-man bludgeonry (which includes Muse!) should rejoice. It might just be SoundCloud talking, but it sounds like the pair are reversing courses from a hot decade of slowly becoming more accessible and rock-centric, diving back into the blown-out, trance-inducing, lowest-fi recording of their 1999 debut. Check out the funkdafied, snare-tastic fireworks below!

August 21, 2012 – Australian drone seismologist Oren Ambarchi has been remarkably, Pollard-ically busy in 2012, releasing five(!) albums before summer's end — including collabos with Jim O'Rouke, Keiji Haino, Stephen O'Malley and Swedish jazzers Fire! Easily the best of the bunch (hell, one of the best avant-garde releases you'll hear all year) is his upcoming Sagittarian Domain (out August 29 via eMego) , a 33-minute black acid trance-out that rides a Neu!-matic groove into haunting, ghostly pits of oblivion. Usually known for sucking holes of pulseless drone, the now rhythmically energized Ambarchi uses a foggy half hour for his barely-there guitars to cross bubbling, boiling paths with the void-embracing gloom-pulse of Beak>, the endless boogie of Wooden Shjips, the colorful trips of Finnish kraut-rockers Siinai, and the post-metal currently washing up in Isis' wake.

August 21, 2012 – Bubbling up from witch house's crustiest cauldron come Crypts, a new project from ex-These Arms Are Snakes front-yelper Steve Snere. It's easy to compare it to contemporary chapel-haunters like Salem or darkwave revisionists like Cold Cave thanks to the booming 808s, syrupy Houston slow rides and googaze synths. But Snere's hardcore-fueled screeching of bloody murder makes this thing closer to "Stigmata"-era Ministry if it were shaking bloody paws with the creepier corners of 4AD. This is ultimately a punk record if Ian MacKaye was seeing purple instead of red. Don't believe us? Hear the blistering opebing track, "Completely Fucked" below, a two-minute tantrum of sultry "Moments in Love" synths meet a pile-up of gabber snares and rubbed-raw screams.

August 14, 2012 – Desert-bleached, spiritually minded, guitar-strangling superdupergroup Rangda — that's Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls), Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and spazz-jazz freaktopus Chris Corsano — have returned for another round of Eastern-infected, fuzz-blustering Cormac McCarthycore. After their knives-out psych-scuzz of their 2010 debut, the band has lassoed themselves into worlds more melodic (certain tracks have the loping gair of Up on the Sun Meat Puppets) and sensual (their freer sections are floatier and fluffier) on their second record Formerly Extinct, out September 18 via Drag City. The Nels-on-peyote, coyboy Meshuggah head-knock of "Majnun," is built on an infectious ostinato (it's two bars of 6 and one bar 10 for you nerds) that spirals heavenward into a sun-mugging cloud-shred breakdown. Get free!