High Zero: Performers

The following individuals will be performing in 100% all-new collaborations during High Zero 2008--

From Afar:

Olga Adorno
spontaneous performance
Nice, France

In the world of avant-garde, particularly in relation to Fluxus and Happenings of New York in the 1960s, Olga Adorno is a legendary figure. Severely under-documented, but highly influentual, her performances at Judson Church and loft spaces in Manhattan defined the extreme limit of ineffable, hard to explain, but extremely meaningful actions within what was already a severely challenging artistic subculture.

Eric Andre Letourneau has said that "Olga Adorno is a living improvisation, she never stops improvising, even walking down the street. Today, in her mid-80's, she lives in Nice and the French Alps with her husband Jean Dupy. She has been invited to High Zero as a special visionary artist, to create unusual situations within the festival, and as of press time, we have no idea what she will do. In fact, we expect it will occur spontaneously in the context of the festival, and to be mystereous to the organizers of the fest, perhaps even years after it is over!
Tetuzi Akiyama
acoustic guitar
Japan

Tetuzi Akiyama plays the guitar with primitive and practical implications, by adding a desire of own to the instrument's characteristic nature in minimal and straight method. He delicately and sometime boldly controls the volume of the sound from micro to macro level, and tries to quantize his physical system.

Since 1998, together with Taku Sugimoto and Toshimaru Nakamura, he had been organizing an inspiring monthly concert series, The Improvisation Meeting at Bar Aoyama (renamed The Experimental Meeting in 1999) and Meeting at Off Site in 2000 until 2003.

Besides making variety of solo albums which covers from fingerpicking acoustic guitar atonalism to noisy experimental drone to never ending boogie, he have made many albums in collaboration with highly praised artists such as Jozef Van Wissem, Donald McPherson, Greg Malcolm, Bruce Russell, Günter Müller, Jason Kahn, Michel Henritzi, Phantom Limb, Gul3, Tim Barnes, Oren Ambarchi, Martin Ng and Alan Licht, just to name a few.

Akiyama is a frequent guest at international music festivals in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand in recent years.
japanimprov.com/takiyama
Liz Allbee
trumpet
San Francisco

Liz Allbee is a voracious musician whose work spans many genres, encompassing new music, improvisation, electronic composition, Asian folk and pop, noise, minimalist, free jazz and experimental rock. She plays in the pop band Neung Phak, in the experimental Neanderthal troubaduo Marauder and Alibi, and in the Jon Raskin Quartet, and has performed and recorded with a wide array of musicians, including Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith, Rova, Axel Dorner, Mazen Kerbaj, Birgit Uhler, Gino Robair, SFSound, and with members of Caroliner Rainbow and the Sun City Girls. She lives in Oakland, CA.
lizallbee.net
Magali Babin
amplified metal
Montreal

Magali Babin is a sound artist from Montreal specializing in soundscapes produced by metal amplified through magnetic pickups. She is a composer of new music and sound designer for theatre where she works with dance and choreography. She will play any time she has the occasion with other musicians to improve her music.

abc sound explored... apple, bee, caviar, disk, echo, friends, gum, hockey, icicle, jeans, kleenex, light, money, nature, orange, plates, quire, rice, slat, television, umbrella, vomit, walkie-talkie, xerox, young men, zoom distortion
myspace.com/magalibabin
Daniel Blacksberg
trombone
Philadelphia

Dan Blacksberg is a major new voice in the Philadelphia improvisation scene. He received his Bachelor of Music in jazz performance from the New England Conservatory. Upon returning to Philadelphia, he became active in the city's rapidly growing creative jazz and improvised music scene. He has performed Daniel has performed with such notable musicians as Joe Morris, Joe Maneri, Daniel Levin, Jack Wright, Bobby Zankel, Mike Pride, Tim Daisy, Nate Mcbride, Charles Cohen, Taylor Ho Bynum, Steve Lantner, Gene Coleman, Katt Hernandez, Jessica Lurie, Brandon Seabrook, Peter Evans and Anthony Braxton.

While at NEC, Dan had the opportunity to work with Irene Aebi on the U.S. Premiere of her late husband Steve Lacy's song cycle Futurities (2004), with Gunther Schuller in the world premiere of Encounters (2003) and to record with pianist Danilo Perez on his recent release the Panama Suite (2006, released 2007).

Daniel is also deeply involved in klezmer music and has played with many of the field's top artists such as Frank London, Michael Alpert, Alan Bern, Hankus Netsky, Adrienne Cooper, Alicia Svigals, Michael Winograd, Alex Kontorovitch, Daniel Kahn, Aaron Alexander and the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra. In 2008, Daniel joined the Other Europeans Project, founded by Alan Bern to investigate the relationship of Jewish and Roma musicians in Bessarabia. He has appeared at the Krakow Jewish Music Festival, at the Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto and Klezmer Festival Fürth as well as many concerts all across the US and Europe. Daniel has taught at both Klezkamp and Klezkanada and at Yiddish Summer Weimar.
danielblacksberg.com
Tony Buck
drums
Berlin

Born in Sydney in 1962, Tony is regarded as one of Australia's most creative and adventurous exports, with vast experience across the globe. He has been involved in a highly diverse array of projects. Apart from The Necks, he is probably best known as leader of hardcore/impro band PERIL.

Early in his musical life, after having graduated from the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music, he became very involved in the jazz scene in Australia, often touring with visiting international artists such as Vincent Herring, Clifford Jordan, Mickey Tucker, Branford Marsalis and Ernie Watts, as well as Australians Mark Simmonds, Paul Grabowsky, The catholics, Sandy Evans and Dale Barlow.

Following time spent in Japan, where he formed PERIL with Otomo Yoshihide and Kato Hideki, Tony moved to Europe, and has involved himself in many projects there, including the development of new "virtual" MIDI controllers at STEIM in Amsterdam.

Tony has played, toured or recorded with, among others, Jon Rose, Nicolas Collins, Tenko, John Zorn, Tom Cora, Phil Minton, Haino, Switchbox, The Machine for Making Sense, Ne Zhdall, The EX, Peter Brotzmann, Hans Reichel, The Little Red Spiders, Subrito Roy Chowdury, Clifford Jordan, Kletka Red, Han Bennink, Shelley Hirsch, Wayne Horvitz, Palinckx, and Ground Zero.
M.V. Carbon
electronics, tapes, cello
NYC

M.V. Carbon is a Brooklyn based musician, sound artist and painter. She uses cello, electronics tape machines and synthesizers to create intricate and moody compositions. She has toured extensively as a solo artist as well as with Metalux. She has collaborated sonically with a long list of artists which includes, Audrey Chen, Tony Conrad, Carlos Giffoni, Zach Layton, Zeljko McMullen, Aki Onda, Evan Parker, Jenny Graf Sheppard, Alex Waterman, John Wiese...

Her work has been released on labels such as 5RC, Load, Hanson, Veglia, No Fun Productions, and Atavistic. Upcoming releases in ‘08 include Jackal Blade-(No-Fi), Tetragonal Solvents- (Nihilist), Metalux, (Rampage).
myspace.com/metalux
Tony Conrad
violins
Buffalo, NY

Tony Conrad (born Anthony S. Conrad in 1940 in Concord, New Hampshire) is an American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer, sound artist, teacher and writer. His father was Arthur Conrad, who worked with Everett Warner during World War II in designing dazzle camouflage for the US Navy. Conrad is a graduate of Harvard University (A.B., 1962, major Mathematics). Since then, he has been a major, if sometimes underground figure in the areas of minimalist music, structuralist film, political video, and concept art.

Conrad's most famous film, The Flicker (1966), is considered a key early work of the structural film movement. The film consists of only completely black and completely white images, which, as the title suggests, produces a flicker when projected. When the film was first screened several viewers in the audience became physically ill.

In music, Conrad was an early (though not original) member of the Theater of Eternal Music, nicknamed The Dream Syndicate, which included John Cale, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela, and utilized just intonation and sustained sound to produce what the group called "dream music." Conrad created the naming scheme for the intervals used today by most musicians involved in just intonation, a tuning system based on the usage of fundamental tones derived from the harmonic series of a single fundamental and thereby based on nature rather than an arbitrary division of the octave.

He performs at High Zero with his brother, Dan Conrad of Baltimore, in their first really significant collaboration on stage together.
tonyconrad.net
Chris Corsano
drums
Scotland

Chris Corsano has gained a well-earned reputation as one of the hardest-working drummers around. Equally at home with intense kinetic explosions of energy and concentrated near-silence, he effortlessly flows from one idea to the next, always sympatico with his fellow musicians. He has recorded and gigged with, among others, Paul Flaherty, Thurston Moore, Jessica Rylan, Jim O'Rourke, Matt Heyner, Michael Flower, Nels Cline, Jandek, Greg Kelly, Daniel Carter, Six Organs of Admittance, Evan Parker, Sunburned Hand Of Man, Okkyung Lee, Wally Shoup, MV&EE, Keiji Haino, Dredd Foole, Vampire Belt, Joe McPhee, Björk, Carlos Giffoni, Akira Sakata, Christina Carter and Heather Leigh Murray.

After moving from western Massachusetts, USA to Manchester, England in 2005 and then Edinburgh, Scotland a year after that, Corsano focused on developing an expanded solo percussion music of his own, incorporating sax reeds, violin strings and bows, pot lids, adhesive tape and other household devices into his drumkit. In February 2006, he released his first solo recording, The Young Cricketer, and toured the UK opening for the mighty acoustic guitarist Jack Rose. Currently, he is the drummer on Björk's Volta world tour.
myspace.com/chriscorsano
G. Lucas Crane
tapes
NYC

G. Lucas Crane is a sound artist, performer, and musician whose work focuses on information anxiety, media confusion, and recycled technology. Using a combination field recordings culled from the underbelly of the contemporary sonic media landscape and homemade electronic instruments, oscillators and broken machines, he creates compositions and performances as a reaction to, and illustration of, our information detritus choked times. Past work has dealt with musicality of a location or route, horror and phantasm in the information age, technology as abomination, the mystical presence of obsolete recording technology, recording as ritual, and the religious, poetic, and magical connotations of feedback and improvisation. Many of the soundscapes and collage work are built around quickly moving tape manipulations, the common cassette being a perfect example of old technology as iconic Gnostic totem. Years of environment recording and sample hunting have resulted in a broken library of material that is collaged together live, an information life that is constantly folding back on itself fractal-like, which he believes illustrates modern experience. Tape manipulation harkens back to the early days of experimental music, and in the context of the digital era it creates a sonic counterpoint on the continuum between hi and low fi, folk outsider and academic composition. Cranes work exists in a meditation on the blurred boundary between new and old tech and the emotional and social toll created by the rapid advancement of the technological sonic/environment.

Recent collaborations include sound design for the Performance Thanatology Research Society’s production of ‘History of Heat’ at the Ontological Hysteric Theater in New York and the Baltimore Theater Project; a European tour with drone collective Vanishing Voice; a production of ‘Oh What War’ at Here Theater in NYC with the Juggernaught Theater company; a ghost story album with Baltimore experimental vocalist Ric Royer; Machine design with New York electronic Instrument company CasperElectronics; Studio and performance work with musical entities Grizzly Bear, Woods, Castanets, and Wooden Wand,; and solo performances as Nonhorse in new York and Europe. He also co-runs Silent Barn, an experimental art and performance space in Queens, New York City.
ricroyer.com/crane.htm
Arrington de Dionyso
voice, bass clarinet
Portland, OR

Arrington de Dionyso uses performance as a vehicle for driving through the nameless territories held between surrealist automatism, shamanic seance, and the folk imagery of rock and roll. Arrington performs on the bass clarinet, jaw harps, and his voice with a distinctly multiphonic ability inspired by Tuvan throatsinging and the ecclesiastics of Albert Ayler and Don Van Vliet. Pushing the envelope between musicality and pure energy, between shamanic ecstacy and lunacy, he enwraps rooms with resonant sound. He tours constantly, and has performed or/and recorded with notable improvisers throughout the U.S.A., Canada, Italy, France, Israel and Japan. He presents workshops on improvising with the voice in conjunction with his travels around the world.
myspace.com/arringtondedionyso
Bill Nace
guitar
North Hampton, MA

Bill Nace is an itinerant guitarist in the improv-minstrel mode. His best known projects are X.O.4(with jake meginsky and john truscinski), Northampton Wools(with thurston moore), Vampire Belt(with chris corsano) and in duo with chris cooper, but he is happy to work without a net in a variety of settings.
Peter Rose
film
Philadelphia

Since 1968 Peter Rose has made over thirty films, tapes, performances and installations. Many of the early works raise intriguing questions about the nature of time, space, light, and perception and draw upon Rose's background in mathematics and on the influence of structuralist filmmakers. He subsequently became interested in language as a subject and in video as a medium and generated a substantial body of work that played with the feel and form of sense, concrete texts, political satire, oddball performance, and a kind of intellectual comedy. Recent work has involved a return to an examination of landscape, time, and vision and takes the form of installation. Rose has been widely exhibited, both nationally and internationally, and has been included in shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, the Centre Pompidou, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Film Society at Lincoln Center, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. He has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Pew Foundation, the Independence Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and is fond of writing descriptions in the third person.

As he has written: Some of us work in a proximate relation with our intended audiences, speaking familiar languages so that the archetypes of our culture may be recognized; and some work out a self-creating interiority from which, if we are lucky, we bring back the shape of a newly imagined alphabet of feeling. I find myself oscillating between these two agendas and find the dialectic a productive one, a reflection of the complex, contradictory nature of our times.
Carlos Santiago
violin
Philadelphia

A unique Philadelphia improvisor, as at home in the farthest-out microtonal and lowercase improvisation as with the maddening mathematical compositions of the rock band Normal Love, of which he is a member.
myspace.com/normallove
Robert van Heumen
electronics
Amsterdam

Robert van Heumen works with sound: electronic, experimental, improvised, structured, composed. Recent works include the compositions 'Vreemdeling (Stranger)', 'Fury', 'Silent' and '12 Bullets' which are performed in multichannel and semi-improvised environments as well as produced for release on CD. As a musician he uses STEIM's live sampling software LiSa and real-time audio-synthesis and algorithmic composition software SuperCollider. He is active as a member of the electronic audio-visual trio SKIF++ (with Jeff Carey & Bas van Koolwijk), noiseband Man in the Middle (with Nicolas Field & Tom Tlalim), Shackle (working with electro-flutist Anne LaBerge on restriction), electro-acoustic sextet OfficeR (with Koen Nutters cs.), founding member of the N Collective, and has shared the stage with dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit), Michel Waisvisz, Richard Barrett, Sakata Akira, Nicolas Collins, Oguz Buyukberber, Luc Houtkamp, Guy Harries, Morten J. Olsen, Daniel Schorno, Roddy Schrock, Audrey Chen, Nate Wooley a.o. His soundworld is a mixture of digital crackles, heavy distortion, melancholic melodies, environmental sounds, voices, sounds from kitchen appliances, most of the time smashed beyond repair. Van Heumen is Managing Director of the STEIM foundation in Amsterdam, curator of the Local Stop concert series and member of STEIM's Artistic Committee. In a previous life mathematician, trumpet player and software programmer. He still reads L.E.J. Brouwer.
hardhatarea.com
Camel Zekri
oud, guitar, electronics
France, North Africa

Camel Zekri was born in Paris in 1962 and studied in North Africa, being of Algerian descent. He became involved in imrpvosied music intensely in 1986, performing frequently with great musicians like D. Répécaud, M. Donéda, N. Lê Quan, J. Di Donato, D. Colin, A. Nozati, and R. Belgacem. Recent collaborators have included Fred Frith and his rock band, The Infusion, with Ron Anderson of Molecules and French bassist Olivier Paquotte.

His music is grounded in North African modes but has powerful connections to abstract experimental music, experimental rock and free music.
Web Site | The Infusion

From Baltimore:

Susan Alcorn
pedal steel guitar

Susan Alcorn is a composer, improvisor, and pedal steel guitarist active in contemporary music and free improvisation. She combines the techniques of country-western pedal steel with her own extended techniques to form a personal style informed by free jazz, avant-garde classical music, Indian ragas, Indigenous traditions, and various folk musics of the world.

Susan has performed at numerous venues and festvals throughout the United States and Europe including: the LMC Festival of Experimental Music (London), Musique Action Festival (Nancy, France) , Leipzig JazzTage, On The Outside Festival (Newcasle, UK), Subtonic and CBGB's (New York), Ateliers Tampon (Paris), The Redroom (Baltimore), Il Continiere (Rome), and the High Zero Festival (2004).

Though mostly a solo performer, she has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Eugene Chadbourne, Peter Kowald, Chris Cutler, Joe Giardullo, Caroline Kraabel, Le Quan Ninh, Sean Meehan, Joe McPhee, LaDonna Smith, Mike Cooper, Misha Feigin, Ellen Fullman, and Johanna Varner.
susanalcorn.com
John Berndt
electronics, reeds, inventions

One of the more active experimental music performers on the East Coast for the past decade, John Berndt began his musical career by composing wildly abstract electro-acoustic and conceptual tape music in 1978 at the tender age of 11. His first compositions in this mode premiered on the radio at age 14, and by his late teens, he was active in an international cultural scene that included some of the most radical cultural activists of the 80's and 90's. From the beginning his work was singular, ranging over the disjoint subcultures of sound art, improvised music, industrial, musical instrument design, and language experimentation. His solo CDs are available on Stereosupremo (Italy), HereSee (Baltimore), Abstract On Black (Pittsburgh), and Sprout (Philadelphia) and he has many published recordings of collaborations.

Berndt began as a composer with a distinctly "inhuman" style and severe set of conceptual preoccupations, but in an unusual development process expanded his sensibility in a variety of contradictory directions, such that his work today is so aesthetically varied as to seem the work of a number of unrelated artists. In 1991 Berndt had heard saxophonist Jack Wright, who became his saxophone teacher, and as a result began to focus on developing his abilities in spontaneous instrumental performance to a high degree. His rigorously strange aesthetic then broadened to incorporate lessons from a variety of clashing modalities: jazz, Indian and African music, and extreme modernist instrumental technique. In this transformation, he was also highly influenced by another collaborator and teacher, the philosopher Henry Flynt, whose critique of the western computational mind-set greatly enabled Berndt's own critical path.

Berndt has always had a wide range of intensive ensemble projects, many of which are only now receiving attention outside of Baltimore. Since 1992, his duo THUS with Neil Feather has produced an entirely unique idiom of "very strange" music on an orchestra of original instruments they invent. As a part of THAT NOTHING IS KNOWN, a quartet with Jack Wright, Michael Zerang, and Bob Marsh, Berndt participated in some of the most inspired "fast" free improvised music of the 90's. Today, he performs regularly with his groups DEATH IN THE MAZE (a post-reductionist chamber improvisation ensemble), GEODESIC GNOME (a super-group performing Berndt's "Impossible" conceptual compositions), directs SECOND NATURE (Baltimore's 16 performer free improvisation orchestra) and participates in EXPLODING GARDENS (a post-jazz composers collective with Katte Hernandez, Gordon Beeferman, and Will Redman).
johnberndt.org
Tom Boram
synthesizer, voice

tom boram, b. 1974AD in baltimore md. member snacks, member leprechaun catering, member baltimore afrobeat society, member second nature improvising orchestra, member broydelic sidecar i. fronted deviled eggs 1994-2000AD. studied classical hindustani music under thakur dr. raj ban singh in varanasi india 2000AD. mental health social worker 1999AD to present. primary influences include - very good food, mediocre food, strange food, junk food, inexpensive food, dessert, odors, wife/love, language, lucid dreaming, moods, rarified personal experience, baltimore, baltimore music, electricity, tap dancing, flatulent sounds, nasal sounds, metallic sounds.
myspace.com/sssnacksss
ehserecords.com/ehse001.html
Alessandro Bosetti
electronics, voice

Alessandro Bosetti was born in Milan, Italy in 1973. He is a composer and sound artist working on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication, producing text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcastings and published recordings. In his work he moves across the line between sound anthropology and composition, often including translation and misunderstanding in the creative process. Field research and interviews build the basis for abstract compositions, along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies, trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations. Recent projects include African Feedback (Errant Bodies press), the interactive speaking machine "MaskMirror" (STEIM, Kunstradio.at a.o. ) and an ongoing project on linguistic enclaves in the USA. Alessandro Bosetti lives between Berlin (DE) and Baltimore (USA).
melgun.net
Samuel Burt
clarinet, electronics

Samuel Burt is a composer of chamber music, a clarinetist, an improvisor, and a teacher and practitioner of electronic music. He studied music composition at the Peabody Institute and the University of Georgia where he took up intuitive improvisation as a side project. Sam's current musical output is split between his new chamber music, often debuted on the After Now concert series, and his improvised concerts with ensembles such as Death in the Maze and Geodesic Gnome. Sam has a great appreciation for the Western tradition and its methods of preserving musical information for later generations, while his participation in the experimental scene flavors his compositions in surprisingly indirect ways. He is exploring alternative ways to convey information to performers with instruction pieces and audio scores. His compositions' formal constructions are increasingly abstract, yet with an intimate immediacy, arising from experimental approaches to large scale structure. Obviously, non-idiomatic techniques performed on traditional instruments have appeared as ornamental and sometime structurally important details in his works. His improvisation favors small group collaborations with an emphasis on experimental ways of playing clarinets, balloons, and laptop. His attention to larger scale structures manifests in his intuitive music as a concentrated balance consisting of blocks of sound effects featuring both sharp contrasts and slow transitions. He favors shorter pieces with distinct classical-movement-like qualities. His current quest is to share with other musicians his experience blending Baltimore's experimental music scene with the traditional training of new chamber music. Sam has found the underground's sense of community, inclusivity, and mature, uncompromising approaches to music making can be of great value to conservatory trained artists entering a competitive occupational field that requires innovation to survive. He has also discovered that improvised music can be a great way to introduce new comers to the diverse forms of non-commercial performance.
Audrey Chen
voice, cello, electronics

Audrey Chen is a Chinese-American musician and performance artist born outside of Chicago in 1976. Using the cello, voice and analog electronics, Chen’s work focuses on the combination and layering of traditional and extended techniques. A large component of her music is improvised and her approach to this is often extremely personal and visceral. Her performance work incorporates sound, movement and visual/sculptural concepts. Chen performs solo and in collaboration with a wide number of musicians and dancers. Among musicians, she has worked with many great improvisers, including Phil Minton, Elliott Sharp, Aki Onda, Phill Niblock, Frederic Blondy, Jim Pugliese, Alessandro Bosetti, Mike Cooper, Mats Gustafsson, Mazen Kerbaj, Michael Zerang, Tatsuya Nakatani, Le Quan Ninh, Joe Mcphee, Susan Alcorn, Michele Doneda, Paolo Angeli, and Gianni Gebbia. Some current projects include: duos with Phil Minton, Frederic Blondy, Robert van Heumen, Heave and Shudder: with Nate Wooley, Isabel: with Katt Hernandez, a trio project with Nate Wooley and C. Spencer Yeh, the quartet, 3AandE: with Seamus Cater, Robert van Heumen and Nate Wooley and Trockeneis: with Andy Hayleck, Dan Breen, Catherine Pancake and Paul Neidhardt. Chen has performed in Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Taiwan and the USA. She is currently based in Baltimore, MD USA where she is member of the Red room and High Zero Collective, an on-going series and international festival devoted to experimental improvised music.
myspace.com/audreychen
Dan Conrad
inventions, light

Dan Conrad is the inventor of the chromaccord instrument for sub-hypnotic retinal color interaction, the wildwave sound field multifrequency-blast generator, and the veena bambeena monocord of justintonian harmonics.

With all of this, the true joy still cannot be expressed.
chromaccord.net
John Eaton
alto saxophone, voice

Costumes I have worn: roadkill, executive, wax skeleton, anarchist, tyranosaurus rex, rogue, mummy, ET (the extra-terrestrial), wonder woman, saxophonist, glowing monster, guerilla, sugar beet piler, augustus gloop, bookman, hitchhiker, wildcat, car mechanic, birthday present, union organizer, jack skellington, juvenile delinquent, ticket taker, sonny (of sonny and cher), acid freak, elephant, victim (of the titanic disaster), gnome, edie sedgewick, large fries, charlie, storm trooper, truck driving son-of-a-gun, coal miner, poet/writer, terrorist, tiger, vandal, queer radical, cia operative, john eaton (the pianist), john eaton (the above). (photo by Rose Hammer Burt)
Carson Garhart
inventions, electronics

At 12 years old we embarked upon punk rock composition. By age 14 we had ventured into the starry realms of psychedelic rock. Turning 16 brought a drivers license and a free jazz trio devoted to the works of the late great Orange Williams. By college we had turned to the electromagnetic heart seeking to uncover the past and the future in one twist of a knob.

Now our work is rooted in the Hermetic arts. We seek a primordial age of beauty and truth through electro acoustic “inventions” and ultra violet services. Uncovering what essentially was never covered.

In this glorious time of two thousand and snake we seek to go beyond the ouruboric quality of time and reach into the vast well spring of heirohistory, to let the imaginal world of reality resurface in green flames burning away His story. For our music cannot be heard through your speakers, and our land cannot be found on your maps, it can only be seen as an inextinguishable light dancing in shapes of You and I.

Nowadays we can be found singing songs as salamander wool, or constructing landscapes and archaic space planes in the popular group Sejayno.
Rose Hammer Burt
saxophones

Born and raised in the western United States, Rose moved to the east coast in 2000 when her strong interest in music led her to pursue a degree in classical saxophone performance at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. At Peabody, she became increasingly involved with the Jazz and Computer Music departments. Upon completion of her undergraduate degree, Rose enrolled in the Masters program in Computer Music. In 2004-05, she collaborated with Michael Formanek in creating the Technology and Improvisation Ensemble, which brought Jazz students in to the Computer Music studios and encouraged them to get familiar with technology that can be used in an improvisational context. Additionally, Rose helped found the 24hc at Peabody, a new music project that puts on new music performances where an extremely short compositional cycle (12 hrs) is followed by an equally short rehearsal cycle (an additional 12 hrs, bringing the total up to 24), ending in a full concert. Encouraged by several faculty members and fellow students to explore improvisation further, she became involved with experimental music at the Red Room, and was invited to join the Red Room collective and High Zero Foundation in the spring of 2005. As a member of the collective she helps book and run an experimental concert series at the Red Room in Baltimore and the annual High Zero Festival of experimental improvised music. Currently she is involved with a new composed music group called After Now which focuses on the creation and performance of new compositions; she performs with Death in the Maze, the Baltimore Afrobeat Society, Second Nature and the After Now series.
Jenny Graf Sheppard
inventions, ideas

Jenny Graf Sheppard (AKA Jenny Graf Bibulah) is a musician, improviser, filmmaker and sound artist who draws from her diverse areas of interest in the production of work. Using radically different approaches to the use of sound in each project, Graf has made films and music and sound pieces, which directly addresses things such as social spaces, cognition, age and gender.

From 2002 – 2003 Graf designed The Guitars Project in which she engaged a group of women with Alzheimer’s with experimentation on the electric guitar. With several grants from the Chicago City Arts Council, she produced a body of work that explored the outcomes of this project-the social significance for the group- using photography, video and an LP Picturedisc titled Iconic Distortions, on BoxMedia.

This year Graf and collaborator Chiara Giovando produced an experimental western film Proud Flesh. The 40-minute short includes four lines of dialogue, features a 70-year-old female gunslinger, and includes an original sound score by Harrius to be released on Baltimore’s Ehse Records.

Interested in the relationship between food consumption and social experience, Jenny Graf and Jorge Martins opened Cabeça Gorda, a family establishment providing an intimate space for gastronomical and sonic experimentation while supporting collaborations between sound artists and chefs from Baltimore and afar.

Since 1996 she has been performing and recording in Metalux with collaborator M.V. Carbon and more recently with Chiara Giovando in Harrius. She has recorded with John Wiese, Smegma, Carlos Giffoni, Evan Parker, Lee Culver, John Edwards and Paul Hession with records ons for Load, Hanson, 5rc, Veglia, BoxMedia, Ehse and Atavistic. She has performed and exhibited her videos internationally in spaces such as Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, D’Amelio Terras Gallery in NYC, Vedanta Gallery in Chicago, Carrie Secrest Gallery in Chicago, in Glasgow, Scotland, at the CCA, Gateshead, England, at the Sage and in Bristol, England, at Arnolfini and in Prague, CZ at the MOFFOM festival.

She is privileged to work and walk among the creative souls of Baltimore.
myspace.com/metalux
Janel Leppin
cello, electronics, autoharp

Since early childhood, Janel has been playing the cello. She has a music degree in cello performance, with a focus on classical and world music. She has studied North Indian classical music in India and the Netherlands and she also performs with the Chakavak Ensemble specializing in Persian Classical Music.

For the last several years, she has been experimenting with free improvisation and has applied effects pedals to her instrument. The duo Janel and Anthony is an experimental group that tours the US for whom she writes and collaborates with electric guitarist Anthony PIrog. They are in the recording studio working on a second and third album. A newly released
album by Joe, Janel and Anthony is a completely improvised disc for trumpet, cello and guitar with Joe Herrera on trumpet. A solo album will be released later this year. Currently she has immersed herself in jazz and is improvising with groups in Washington, DC.
janelleppin.com | myspace.com/janelandanthony
Michael Muniak
electronics

I have attached a picture of my cat Tiberius ("TB"). He is very sweet, and loves to sleep under cars on the street. We each have a good left ear, and a bad right ear.
muniak.com
Paul Neidhardt
percussion, friction

Baltimore's Paul Neidhardt is one of the countries most astonishing new music percussionists. A trained, highly disciplined player with a flair for complex textural sound produced by friction, Neidhardt's approach to improvising covers the majority of the terrain explored by the explosive side of European free music and subtle textural players like Sean Meehan and Jason Kahn, while retaining a freshness and flexibility of purpose all his own. His background playing rock and African music adds a potential for propulsive intesnivty to his playing not usually found in players so skilled in the arts of minimalist reductionism. Despite recovering from injuries that limited his time playing in recent years, he is a highly in-demand player, working with groups like Trokeneis, Death in the Maze, and Multiphonic Choir, as well as frequent collaborations with Jack Wright. He is currently a member of the Red Room collective and High Zero Foundation.
Ric Royer
voice, tapes

Ric Royer resides in Baltimore where he is an organizer of the Transmodern Performance Festival (www.transmodernage.com ). In my work I try really hard to be a pleasure to others. Check out all of my truths, delivered with occasional passion. My things navigate through the most obscene, uncomfortable, and disturbing aspects of the psyche in order to stimulate a deep archaic root of radical libidinousness. Dramatic contrasts of moral values appeal to me, I use them to trace moments I have imagined. Each sketch acts as a guidepost to ensure that I don't take my/yourself too seriously, but just seriously enough.

With love and inspiration, Ric
ricroyer.com
M.C. Schmidt
electronics

M.C. Schmidt is a recently arrived smellfeast at the Baltimore banquet. Mr. Schmidt is a housewife and a "professional" sound artiste. As a member of his band Matmos (with partner in crime Dr. Drew Daniel) Mr. Schmidt has shared the stage with Terry Riley, the Kronos Quartet, Bjork, Leprechaun Catering, Marshall Allen, David Serotte, 12 live snails, a lemon, and probably hundreds of other people and things. He is very pleased that it's all going so well and tries to appreciate it.
brainwashed.com/matmos