Two-time Grammy-nominated musician Eric Alexandrakis has one of those careers that reads like a name-dropping exercise, except it’s all true. Discovered by Duran Duran’s John Taylor, the Rethymno, Greece-based artist has collaborated with John Malkovich, Yoko Ono, members of The Cure, The Smiths, and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, and the late Dolores O’Riordan – he also produced the first digitally watermarked CD, for what that’s worth. “Life Is Better Live,” released on May 18th, 2026, doesn’t arrive as a typical single. It’s the soundtrack to a short film by visual artist Sandro Miller, commissioned for “Steppenwolf 50: Through the Eye of Sandro Miller,” a multimedia exhibition at Highland Park Arts Center marking the 50th anniversary of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company. The track was recorded on Okanagan Lake in British Columbia, mixed by Alexandrakis alongside Brian Leitner, and draws explicit influence from avant-garde composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage.
As an avant-garde piece, it seeks to stretch out the definition of music – what do we consider music versus just sequential noises? It’s best described as an auditory experience that can be enhanced with visual aids, and it was originally curated to accompany Sandro Miller’s short film, so that checks out. However, it can be enjoyed on its own as an evocative experience if you have the imagination and the patience for it.
The Stockhausen and Cage lineage is worth taking seriously here. Both spent careers asking what sound could become when freed from conventional structure, and “Life Is Better Live” operates in that same territory. Whether you find that rewarding or frustrating says more about your relationship with experimental music than it does about the track itself. As soundtrack material, it has a clear context and function. As a standalone listen, it asks more of the audience, and not everyone will want to meet it there. But that’s the purpose of avant-garde music: pushing boundaries and challenging audiences.