Ex-Easter Island Head are an experimental collective of musicians and composers made up of Benjamin D. Duvall, Benjamin Fair, Jonathan Hering, and Andrew PM Hunt – who performed at Rewire last year under his Dialect alias. Their work is performed with percussion and a variety of instruments – most notably with prepared electric guitars that they augment mechanically and approach with extended techniques. Their ambient- and kraut-rock-infused music is based around cycles and slowly unfurling musical phrases that brim with iridescence. Lathered in texture and permeating with harmonics, their rich repetitions hypnotise and lull. With dauntless creativity and sensitivity, Ex-Easter Island Head transmogrify their instruments, assembling them aurally into something that sounds closer to animal-song than something made by humans. Their shimmering and peculiar electroacoustic songs sound like a collaboration between Akira (1988) composer Shōji Yamashiro and no-wave guitar maestro Glenn Branca. Their latest album Norther (2024) is exemplary of their fearless experimentation, earning them a space at the very peak of The Quietus’s top albums of the year so far.