Bandcamp is an online music platform used largely by independent artists and record labels to stream songs and sell merchandise. It’s also a vibrant virtual community teeming with interesting sounds just waiting to be discovered. Each week, I’ll highlight three releases available on the site that are well worth your time and attention. If you find something you dig, please consider supporting the artist with a purchase.

Laraaji

“Celestial Music 1978 — 2011” laraajimusic.bandcamp.com/album/celestial-music-1978-2011

Legendary musician and mystic Laraaji has a new album called “Sun Piano” coming out next month, on which he returns to his roots in straightforward piano music. Before you dig in to that — and I know you will — be sure to familiarize yourself with the far-out experimental music the man’s been making for the past four decades.

Laraaji started out playing on the sidewalks of New York City where he was discovered by Brian Eno, who produced his third album and thrust him into the relatively dim spotlight that shines on makers of ambient, drone and New Age music. This career-spanning collection is an endlessly engaging soundscape of blissful zither tunes, synthesizer hymns, drifting tones and meditative zones.

Brittany Howard

“Jaime” brittanyhoward.bandcamp.com/album/jaime

It may feel like a lifetime, but it was only four years ago that Southern blues-rock band Alabama Shakes sold out Bend’s Les Schwab Amphitheater and apparently killed it, as the kids (don’t) say. (“LSA’s season may have just peaked,” wrote The Bulletin’s Brian McElhiney after the show, “and it has only just begun.”)

And while the Shakes’ sound is tailor-made for a wide swath of people, it’s clear powerhouse frontperson Brittany Howard has other interests, too. Example A is her first solo record, 2019’s “Jaime,” which is just straight-up weird in a very approachable way.

It sounds like someone made a deeply soulful album about love, loss, hope, resistance, self-acceptance and empowerment, then folded it into an origami alien, dipped it in a viscous mixture of fuzz, hiss and intimacy, and staked it to a heart laid bare like never before.

Damu the Fudgemunk, Archie Shepp & Raw Poetic

“Ocean Bridges” damuthefudgemunk.bandcamp.com/album/ocean-bridges

From his place alongside John Coltrane in the avant-garde jazz scene of the ’60s to his Afro-centric explorations in the ’70s to the global wanderings of his later career, saxophonist Archie Shepp has been pushing the boundaries of music for decades. And he has no plans to stop, if this energetic new work is any indication. Recorded in one long session, “Ocean Bridges” is entirely improvised by an eight-piece band, yet it still lands assuredly on the blurry border between jazz and hip-hop. That border has been traversed many times, of course, but rarely does it sound so confidently untidy. Led by Shepp, multi-instrumentalist Damu the Fudgemunk and rapper Raw Poetic (Shepp’s nephew), the group sounds like a living, breathing being that innately understands how to draw beauty and aplomb out of jazz-rap while still leaving space for reflection in the arrangements.