International Strange Music Day falls on 24 August, and its instruction is unusually blunt: listen to something you would normally skip. A New York composer, Patrick Grant, started it in the late 1990s to promote an album, and chose the date because it was the birthday of an artistic mentor rather than any anniversary in music history. Nobody organises it and there is no official programme. Its subject is strange music, not strange instruments.

What International Strange Music Day is

International Strange Music Day is an unofficial observance held on 24 August, and its subject is the music rather than the hardware. No government designated it, no industry body sponsors it, and there is no register of events, no annual theme and no central organisation. What exists is a date and a single instruction, which the day’s founder has framed as listening without prejudice: for one day, switch off the filter that decides within three seconds whether a piece of music is for you.

That makes it one of the cheapest observances in the calendar to keep and one of the easiest to fake. Anyone can post a link to something atonal and call it done. The version worth doing takes longer, because the interesting variable is not the music’s strangeness but yours — which conventions you have absorbed so completely that breaking them registers as a mistake rather than a choice.

Who started it, and why the year is unsettled

What is documented about the origin is more interesting than the version usually printed. Patrick Grant, born in Detroit in 1963 and long based in New York City, is a composer whose work runs from post-punk and post-minimalism through Balinese gamelan and microtonal writing to ambient electronic music, and who later became known for the mobile electric guitar procession Tilted Axes. He started the day partly as promotion: it takes its name from his album Fields Amaze and Other sTrange Music.

The date is personal rather than historical. Grant picked 24 August because it was the birthday of his then girlfriend’s father, a man who had acted as something of an artistic mentor to him. The word International came later, around 2002, once he found the day being marked by artists and venues in Europe. Both facts are absent from most accounts, which is a shame: a private dedication and an album plug make a more honest founding story than the vague talk of celebrating diversity that usually replaces them.

The year is where the accounts diverge, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than picking one. Two of the larger observance calendars date the creation to 1997, a third puts it in 1995, and a fourth will only commit to somewhere around 1997 to 1999. The much-repeated line that the day was established in 1997 and first officially celebrated in 1998 has no traceable source behind it; no first observance is recorded anywhere that can be checked, and the two years travel together only in copies of one another. The earliest independent trace of the day I could confirm is a Houston Press column about it from September 2007.

What makes music strange rather than merely unfamiliar

The hard question the day raises is what strange means, and the honest answer is that it names a relation, not a property. The list of strange genres usually attached to this day makes the point by accident: mathcore, chiptune, spacesynth, epic doom metal and Russian chanson. Not one of those is strange to the people who listen to it. Each has a canon, a set of scene-defining records, and listeners who will argue with you about which records those are.

Russian chanson is the clearest case. To an English-speaking listener it registers as an exotic curiosity; in Russia it is a mass-market genre with its own national radio station and an annual awards ceremony staged in the State Kremlin Palace, and it is contentious there for its content — a prosecutor general once called it propaganda of the criminal subculture — rather than for sounding odd. Spacesynth is similar: a documented mid-1980s offshoot of Italo disco with named practitioners, among them Laserdance, Koto and Proxyon.

So there are two different things a listener can mean. The first is unfamiliar, which is a fact about the listener and can be fixed in an afternoon. The second is deliberately strange: music built to break a convention on purpose, where the strangeness is the argument rather than a side effect. Unlike World Music Day, which sends amateur musicians into the street to play, this day asks nothing of your hands — only that you notice which of the two you have run into.

The music the day points at

The deliberate kind of strangeness has a lineage, and it begins with recording. Pierre Schaeffer, working in the Studio d’Essai at France’s national broadcaster, premiered five short pieces in Paris on 5 October 1948 under the title Cinq études de bruits — five studies of noises. One of them, Étude aux chemins de fer, was assembled from recordings of trains. By 1949 the approach had a public name, musique concrète, and with it the premise that any recorded sound is available as musical material.

John Cage’s 4′33″ goes further by removing the performer’s contribution altogether. Composed in 1952 and premiered by the pianist David Tudor at Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York on 29 August 1952, it runs three movements — thirty seconds, two minutes twenty-three, and one minute forty — during which the score instructs the player not to play. It is routinely described as a silent piece, which inverts the point. Cage’s claim was that there is no such thing as silence, and that what an audience took for silence was sound it had not learned to hear.

Running alongside all this is outsider music, a category the journalist Irwin Chusid named in a 1996 magazine piece and expanded into the 2000 book Songs in the Key of Z. Its canonical figures are self-taught and largely unaware of the conventions they break: the Shaggs, a family band whose 1969 album Philosophy of the World has been called both the worst rock record ever made and an influential one, alongside Wesley Willis, Daniel Johnston and Jandek, each of whom became the subject of a documentary in the 2000s. This is the corner of the day that needs care, because the line between admiring a musician and laughing at one is thin, and nothing about the day polices it.

How the day is actually marked

Because nobody owns the date, what happens on it is whatever individuals decide, and most of it happens in headphones. Listening sessions, playlist swaps and posts under the day’s hashtags are the bulk of it; small performance evenings, informal gigs and sing-alongs are the rest. Grant has marked it himself — a 2012 performance soirée in New York drew a crowd of experimental bands and musicians — and he is separately credited with a 2013 Guinness World Record for a piece played on 175 electronic keyboards in the city.

Streaming is what actually changed the day. When it started, acting on the instruction meant a specialist record shop, a college radio station or a friend with peculiar taste. Now the whole catalogue of odd corners sits behind a search box, and the granular genre tags that streaming services generate work as a ready-made itinerary. The obstacle has moved from availability to willingness, which is the obstacle the day was aimed at in the first place.

How to mark International Strange Music Day

Celebrating International Strange Music Day costs nothing and needs no equipment beyond whatever you already listen on. Pick one of these and finish it before 24 August is over.

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