In his monthly column System Focus, The FADER's favorite underground music critic Adam Harper stares deep into the internet's gloom to unearth emerging musical forms.

What is experimental music, and what does it want from us? As a term and as a field of music-making, it's widely accepted but fits uncomfortably and is never well defined. "Experimental music" was a phrase used in the mid-twentieth-century to describe a range of ultramodernist compositional techniques as being a form of quasi-scientific research. John Cage was careful to point out that the term should apply to music "the outcome of which is not known"—that is, music with chance elements or improvisation built into it—since a composer ought to have completed all the necessary experiments before the piece was finished. And yet in everyday parlance, especially in popular music, "experimental" music has come to refer to music that seems radically unconventional, pretty weird, as if to experiment with the very building blocks of musical beauty.

In the underground, experimental currents have been around for decades, the magma bubbling away beneath the crust of more traditional musics, slowing feeding it as it surfaces and hardens. Every now and then, however, flesh becomes stone and stone becomes flesh: something that glows and burns, thrills and terrifies, flies out from the deep. I'm talking about the recent New York School of enterprising electronic music: Laurel Halo, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Holly Herndon (while not NYC-based, there's an affiliation), together with the associated labels, various Altered Zones and GHE20G0TH1K alumni, and the network that links them up and spreads out from them all. The bizarre albums produced by this crew have been some of the biggest and most surprising hits in a community that was more concerned with indie-pop, folk, and rock just a few years earlier. Much like the recent resurgence of science fiction in cinemas, what used to be only for weirdos has taken centre stage. Most interestingly—and this is what this month's column is about—this new moment in electronic adventuring seems to have opened the door for a wave of even stranger artists and labels exploring what it means to be experimental in the techno-mediated spaces and tense modernities of the 2010s.