If, Bwana + Gobby

Fusing ambient, industrial, and musique concrète sounds, the composed improvisations and improvised compositions of If, Bwana (short for “It’s funny, but we are not amused”) are extended explorations of how to play instruments the wrong way. Detuned accordions and bassoons abound; duos divide the labor of simultaneously playing and destroying a piano; elsewhere, attempts to compose works of total silence yield the fuzzed-over sound of an empty deck endlessly spinning. If, Bwana has been Al Margolis’s solo project for over four decades. Margolis is the founder of the influential experimental labels Sound of Pig, a cornerstone of the 1980s underground cassette and DIY music scene, and Pogus Productions, which focuses on post-Cagian electronic, electroacoustic, and avant-garde sound, through which he has released hundreds of albums. 

Boston-born, self-taught producer and illustrator Gobby is a through-and-through maximalist, the kind of artist who revels in layering a comically wide range of genres, from spaghetti western soundtracks to trap music to metal-meets-medieval dungeon synth. His signature sound—omnivorous, restless—is marked by the continual adoption and abandonment of musical ideas, to astonishing narrative effect. His recent Blue AF (2025), a forty-two-minute piece that keeps T-boning itself, interrupting synthetic strings with droll accordions, is a kind of postmodern symphony, nudging listeners through a dizzying span of woozy bedroom pop; piano bar blues; swarming space-age chords; and distant, field-recorded clanging, culminating in a squeakily explosive warbling of horns. For Gobby, who likens his beat tapes to sketchbooks and his film and video game soundtracks to still lifes, this latest turn might best be compared to a Boschian epic: surreal, apocalyptic, and dense with hilarious, irreverent flourishes.