By Nathan Evans
Publication Date: 2026-02-11 10:38:00
Chloë Sobek is a musician from Melbourne who plays the violone, a Renaissance forerunner of the double bass. But instead of playing it the traditional way, she places wiggly pieces of cardboard between the strings or uses a sheep bone as a bow, and these strange interventions have become catnip for Instagram’s algorithm, earning her tens of thousands – sometimes hundreds of thousands – of views on each of her self-made performance videos. “Although it may seem at first glance, I am a somewhat shy person,” she says.
When Laurie Anderson’s robotic-minimalist masterpiece “O Superman” reached No. 2 in the British charts in 1981 thanks to uninterrupted airplay on John Peel’s radio show, it signaled the power of a media company to bring experimental music into the mainstream. It’s happening again now, as prepared instrument players like Sobek, as well as experimental pianists, microtonal singers, and numerous other boundary-pushing solo artists, routinely break out of the underground…