Album art by Aaron Myers-Brooks

Style: Progressive metal, math rock, experimental rock (instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: Angine de Poitrine, Hella, Frank Zappa
Country: United States
Release date: 26 June 2026

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Microtonal music ain’t easy. To the average Western ear, any significant deviation from the familiar twelve-tone piano-key structure that we’ve had burned into our brains from infancy has a tendency to feel uncanny at best and fundamentally wrong at worst. Sure, there are a number of other tuning systems found across the world, but here in the Anglosphere, microtones are generally consigned to the realms of either oddball novelty acts like Angine de Poitrine or esoteric fuckery made by nerds who are trying more to flex how much music theory they know than to actually create something that sounds good. And yet, there are acts who have broken free of these perceptions and managed to make microtonal music that moves the masses, with the dreamlike, shimmering alt-pop of Maddie Ashman, the warm yet fiendishly intricate math-folk of Spiral Garden, and the manic, off-kilter prog bangers of The Mercury Tree all having been received warmly on this very site. Now, another contender steps up to lay claim to the many-toned throne: Aaron Myers-Brooks, a Pittsburgh-based music theory professor who moonlights as a math-metal shredder and avant-garde electronica producer. Can his latest solo EP, Fictional Planetoids, successfully leverage his considerable theory knowledge into a memorable voyage through the unknown, or are these Planetoids best left uninhabited?

As soon as the plasticky, synthetic drum-machine pulse hits on opener “Immediate Magnet”, one truth is painfully self-evident: Fictional Planetoids is a scrappy, independent bedroom project to its absolute core. Now, of course, there’s nothing wrong with independent bedroom projects in and of themselves; with today’s VST technology, even the most low-budget of artists can spin forth some stunning soundscapes with sufficient skill. Yet, unfortunately, Myers-Brooks is not such an artist, eschewing the fascinatingly layered textures employed by many of his microtonal contemporaries in favor of a sound so barebones it would make a skeletal nudist blush. This is music constructed with the absolute bare minimum of ingredients: no synths, no orchestration, no bass even, nothing but two tracks’ worth of 17tet¹ guitar alongside a single drum machine that sounds as though it were programmed by a middle school robotics team. It’s a perplexingly grating sonic choice from someone who, according to his website, teaches a course on Ableton and thus should know better than anyone how to create arrangements that at least sound passable. Imagine if you went to a Michelin-star chef and got served a bowl of acorn flour mixed with tap water and hot pepper extract—a daring experiment in minimalism outside the mainstream, to be sure, but not something most people would enjoy actually eating.

Alright, maybe I’m being a bit harsh. So what if the soundscapes are a bit minimalist and tinny-sounding? Plenty of great artists do a lot with a little—so long as the compositions are memorable, beautiful, or adventurous enough, it can do a lot to excuse any lack of polish on the surface. And, to be fair, there are the seeds of some interesting ideas here. Myers-Brooks certainly loves his odd time signatures, with rhythms and riffs starting and stopping unpredictably throughout the record, and one could imagine tracks like “Nebulae Dance” being a genuinely tricky little metric workout if given to a proper prog band who could flesh it out beyond its current demo-esque level of completion. The compositions are quick and economical two-minute sketches, yet most have a certain build or shift to them without relying on the same idea throughout. And some, such as “Immediate Magnet” and “Imagined Statue”, manage to craft some decently metallic riffs that show the potential to leverage their microtonal nature into something genuinely sharp-edged.

Yet, for whatever small compositional wins Myers-Brooks manages to eke out of this record, they are unilaterally overcome by the simple fact that the very act of listening to Fictional Planetoids is physically unpleasant, and not in a heavy, disquieting Jute Gyte kind of way either. Sure, “Flight of Spikes” tries its best to evolve its wacky off-kilter guitar motifs from merely uncanny to downright intimidating, but any impact or dynamic buildup is impossible to take seriously due to the fact that its percussion sounds like an asthmatic robot mouse hiccuping as it falls down the stairs. The riffs may gesture at heft and muscle, but any actual heaviness is undercut by the fact that there isn’t any fucking bass, leaving said riffs feeling far too hollow and top-heavy to strike with any force. And, of course, the fact remains that though microtonality brings some inherent challenges, many of the riffs and lines here make zero attempt to soften said edges to sound more musically palatable the way other microtonal artists often do, making them just as incapable of inspiring love as they are of inspiring fear. There are exceptions, such as the energetic rocker and relative highlight “Galaxy Vehicle”, but even that track barely rises above the level of “generic royalty-free rock instrumental #87” thanks to, again, its painfully plastic production. A shame, really.

Fictional Planetoids is not a complete work, not even as an EP. It just isn’t. It’s eight slapped-together demo tracks that, taken together, don’t even breach the sixteen-minute mark, and had it not been emailed directly to our blog for reviewing consideration, I would feel bad for picking on it. But it was, and since Myers-Brooks stated in said email that he reads our blog, I want to address him directly with a bit of constructive feedback: Give your stuff more time to cook. There are bits of good ideas in here, no doubt, and you’ve certainly got enough musical know-how to pull off some genuinely boundary-breaking work. To do so, though, you’ve gotta flesh those ideas out and develop them beyond these short, rough, frustratingly half-formed demos—put those electronic production skills into practice, maybe add a guest collaborator or two, and these skeletal sketches will have some flesh put on ’em in no time. With enough effort, you very well could create some full-on worlds of alien sound worth exploring. But for now, unfortunately, these Planetoids shall remain barren and uninhabitable.

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Recommended tracks: Galaxy Vehicle, Nebulae Dance
You may also like: The Mercury Tree, Blotted Science, Jute Gyte
Final verdict: 3/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Website

Aaron Myers-Brooks is:
– Aaron Myers-Brooks (17EDO guitar, drum programming)

1. That is to say, 17-tone equal temperament tuning, in which an octave is divided into 17 equally split notes instead of the usual 12. Popular due to its containing of a diatonic perfect fifth while still sounding more avant-garde than the 24-tone scales used by the likes of Angine and King Gizzard. ↩︎