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The slight, unassuming woman, dressed all in black and seated at a table behind a laptop computer, coaxed wisps of feedback from an electric guitar lying flat in her lap, blending its tones with radio static and snippets of chatter in German and English. Berlin native Annette Krebs' music at times seemed no louder than conversations in the basement-level bar. The volume level kicked up a notch when members of the group Zanzibar Snails joined in for an extemporaneous give-and-take.

A few minutes later, it was Chris Cogburn's turn. The Austin percussionist used cymbals and drumheads, but not in ways their manufacturers intended. He pulled a violin bow across the cymbal's edge and scraped cymbals and beaters across drumheads rather than striking them. As he played, Zurich-based drummer Jason Kahn picked up the sound with his sound processors and altered it electronically, changing Cogburn's organic sounds into static and sound waves. Then two more of the Snails joined in, on an electric violin and sine wave generator, for a cacophonous, free-form romp.

And all of this in the heart of Fort Worth's boot-scootin', line-dancin' Stockyards. No Willie, no backbeat, no catchy choruses here. That cowboy buried on the lone prair-ee was probably spinning in his narrow grave.

"I didn't realize Karlheinz Stockhausen was going to be in the house!" one wag remarked, no doubt enjoying the idea that, beyond the 40 or so fans gathered in the low-ceilinged confines of Lola's Stockyards, few if any other people in the vicinity of Exchange Avenue and Main Street that night probably even knew who the visionary and controversial German composer was.

On that Tuesday evening last February at Lola's, downstairs from the Star Café, the vibrations were atonal, minimalist, and electronic, and the musos were from all over the world. The No Idea Fest, an international celebration of musical improvisation begun by Cogburn six years earlier, had made its Panther City debut.

No Idea brought the shock of the "new" - though the genre's been around for more than 40 years now - to the most visible bastion of Cowtown's past. But it was really just the latest manifestation of something that's been flying under the radar here for a while.

Fort Worth has been growing an experimental music scene, bit by bit, for a decade or so. Herb Levy, a well-known "new music" promoter in Boston and Seattle, has been presenting experimental artists of international stature in classy settings like the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth since 2005. Last weekend, the Metrognome Collective reopened in a new space with the announced intention of providing a venue for experimental sounds. Fort Worth native Michael Chamy is creating some waves with the Zanzibar Snails, his noise/improv outfit, and his Mayrrh Records label. There's even a house in Arlington that's been putting on shows by local avant-gardistas.

Some of this music might ring a faint bell for listeners who've heard experimental musical influences in movie soundtracks and the work of '60s rockers like the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Frank Zappa or even Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.

But experimental sounds in their undiluted form also resonate for a younger generation who came of age with the entire history of recorded music accessible at the click of a mouse. The twentysomething rock 'n' roll kids at the Chat Room Pub have been exposed to frontier-pushing innovators from '70s-era Miles Davis to prolific Japanese noise artist Masami Akita (who performs under the Germanic moniker Merzbow). Their ears are wide open, and there's more to hear all the time.

The sounds heard at No Idea - which ranged from muted to bombastic, irritating to uplifting - had their genesis in the 1940s work of French recording engineer Pierre Schaeffer, who created the earliest examples of musique concrete from primitive samples he borrowed from sound-effects records using a disc-cutting lathe, playing them backward or at different speeds and juxtaposing them with other sounds to create a jarring sonic bath. By the '50s, Stockhausen was electronically altering the sounds of voices and instruments and using the placement of musicians and loudspeakers in concert halls to create head-spinning effects. His later works included a string quartet for musicians flying in four separate helicopters.

At the same time, the American John Cage was writing pieces for the prepared piano - played with objects placed on its strings to alter its tonal quality - and instruments he fabricated from automotive detritus. Influenced by a study of Zen Buddhism, Cage used rolls of the dice to determine the sound, duration, volume, and tempo of events in his compositions. His piece 4'33" consisted of three movements during which the performer plays not a single note; the composer intended for his listeners to focus on the sounds of their environment.

These innovators' forays into electronics, chance music, spatialization, drones, and the use of instruments in unconventional ways radically redefined what music could be. Or perhaps more accurately, what could be music: not just atonality but also everyday sounds, white noise, or even silence. Modern experimental music can encompass anything from soothing ambient drones to jarring, industrial-sounding "harsh noise." It goes by the name of experimental or avant-garde or just "new music."

New music enjoys its greatest popularity in Europe, Japan, and American cities like San Francisco and New York, where the Bang on a Can festival has presented performances and commissioned works since 1987. But there are festivals of experimental music in cities as unlikely as Boise, Idaho, and Athens, Ohio, and performers like percussionist Ikue Mori, harpist Zeena Parkins, and Texas-born accordionist Pauline Oliveros tour the U.S. frequently.

It's taken awhile for an audience receptive to such sounds to develop here. As far back as 1982, Johnny Case was recording Remnants, an album of musique concrete sound collages that were unlikely to appeal to fans of his jazz piano stylings at Sardine's Ristorante Italiano.

A few years later, Doug Ferguson started making home recordings of his own improvisations on old analog synthesizers and handing out the resulting cassettes to friends. In 1995, Ferguson got together with percussionist S. Forest Ward, bassist-drummer Nathan Brown, and clarinetist Chris Forrest to form Ohm, a band that achieved international status while remaining resolutely obscure at home. They played in venues ranging from rawk dumps to the sidewalk in front of the old Coffee Haus at 404 Houston St. in downtown Fort Worth.