Baltimore's High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music is in it’s 22nd year! We are undaunted by the bizarre situation we are all in, and it has motivated us to do something audacious with our 4 day festival of all new music. The High Zero Festival is partnering with like-minded festivals throughout the country. One of the core ideas of The High Zero Festival is to have a wide variety of experimental musicians who have not played together before become instant musical collaborators, making musical decisions in real time and working through those decisions to open up unplanned musical worlds. We have decided to take that to a macro level by becoming collaborators with other curators in other cities, many of whom we’ve never met!
The Program is as follows:
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 24th will be curated by Santa Fe New Mexico’s HIGH MAYHEM FESTIVAL "Operating as a non profit dedicated to challenging the homogenizing effect of pop-culture groupthink by providing opportunities for and fostering collaborations with underrepresented “experimental” artists”, since 2001.
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 25th will be curated by Chicago, Illinois’ ELASTIC ARTS “Since 2002 they have been presenting innovative, non-conventional music, art, and performance, Elastic Arts provides the community the opportunity to participate in uncommon programming in an intimate performance environment, free from commercial restraints.”
SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 26th will be curated by Baltimore's, HIGH ZERO FOUNDATION For 22 years The High Zero Festival has been unlike many related festivals, not narrow in terms of sensibility or subculture, but rather widely inclusive of all the different types of experimental music-making in the moment.
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 27th will be curated by Seattle, Washington’s SEATTLE IMPROVISED MUSIC FESTIVAL. For 35 years SIMF, and their meta-body Nonsequitur has "been an unwavering champion of under-represented music and musicians. It has helped reveal and sustain an otherwise too fragile creative ecology."
Every night The National High Zero Festival will present an improvised ensemble performance, 2 improvised solo performances and to acknowledge the medium by which all of this is getting presented this year, a piece by a local experimental film/video maker.
High Zero Festival has always been a call to life and collective action beyond the prosaic and repetitive. This year, we all more than ever need a sense of possibility and a chance to look beyond that rigid patterns of the present moment. The collective upwelling of talent, eccentric thinking, and pure sensuality that is High Zero Festival is a perfect escape hatch for these overly constrained times. We hope you will join the party.
The festival will be broadcast at 8PM Eastern at https://www.twitch.tv/highzerofoundation Other relevant web addresses are highzero.org @highzero redroom.org You can write to us through Martin Schmidt, acting president at vagueterrain@verizon.net, you can sign up for a mailing list at redroom.org The High Zero Foundation is 100% volunteer run and largely (though not entirely) paid for by individual donations. Please help us if you can, by spreading the word, making a donation, writing an article, posting a post, writing a poem, singing a griot, making a dance piece, or just by watching and listening.
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