About the Musicians

A Bevy of Sonic Radicals

Links are to Real Audio Streams of performance excerpts by some of the players...
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Sean Meehan Solo (percussion)
Jack Wright Solo (saxophone)
Neil Feather Solo (Nondo)
Jack Wright, Michael Zerang, John Berndt, Bob Marsh Quartet
Evan Rapport, Jerry Lim, Bob Wagner Trio
Bhob Rainey, Greg Kelley, Tatsuya Nakatani Trio

Accordionist MICHAEL BENEDETTI (Philadelphia) has been performing in drag since 1982, and staging original and classic drama since 1984. If you want, he can teach you how to swim.

JOHN BERNDT (Baltimore) has been intensely involved with a wide array of experimental sound works since childhood, when he began to compose electronic and tape music and to invent original means of sound production. He sees this activity as an outgrowth of profoundly non-conformist spirituality; in the early 90s, his music broadened from live electronics to include solo saxophone improvisations and duos with master saxophonist Jack Wright, and ensemble concerts with his three very different groups THUS, That Nothing is Known, and Music in The Key of Zero. He has performed widely in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Guitarist/pianist TOM BORAM (Baltimore) is from space. He is satisfied with his earth sentence; he cooks, writes, fronts the Deviled Eggs (also from space).

F. VATTEL CHERRY (Baltimore) plays acoustic bass. "I heard a wise man once say that Love is need of Love today Well, if Music is Love & Love is Music (if you know what I mean) And we know God is Love. Now what? What do you believe? What do you know? What are you going to do? Is there anything good inside of you?" - F. Vattel Cherry

Synthesist CHARLES COHEN (Philadelphia) has been composing and performing electronic music since 1971. His main tools are drawn from a 20 year collection of analog and digital instruments made by synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla of Berkeley, California. His process focuses on mood, atmosphere, and landscape in the context of self-conscious collaboration and exploration.

JOHN DIERKER (Baltimore) is one of the most distinctive improvising voices in Baltimore; a highly versatile musician who plays with equal inspiration in the most extreme avant-garde music as in more conventional jazz and rock bands. He can be heard on a large number of disks issued by the Megaphone label, has played with rock legend Jad Fair, and toured with avant-garde musicians from NYC like Sean Meehan and Paul Hoskins.

Saxophonist and bagpiper PAUL DUNMALL (England) is one of the leading exponents of the European Free Music scene, probably best known in the US for his work with the quartet Mujician (Cuneiform Records). An inventive and passionate improviser, his explorations of cross-genre music always reflect his strong jazz roots.

Sound Mechanic NEIL FEATHER (Baltimore) has been creating radically unusual musical instruments for 30 years. His instruments each embody unique and clever acoustic and engineering principles, and are visually arresting. The music he plays on these instruments is equally original, also embodying new principles and resulting in a nearly alien idiom of music. A standing member of THUS and THE OFFICIAL PROJECT, he has a long history of collaborative projects and solo concerts.

DAVID FORLANO (Philadelphia) is a versatile multimedia performer/composer active in acoustic and electronic music. Since 1991, he has been composing, recording, and playing live music for theater, film, performance art and dance. David's independent performance works include "Footprint/Songline," "Paper, Light, Sound" and "Late October." Currently, David helps curate IMP, an ongoing music and performance series in Philadelphia, and is guitarist in his two music groups Plankton Trio and Plateaux of Mirror.

MICHAEL JOHNSON (Pittsburgh) is the son of Rainer Johnson and Greta Johnson.

Trumpeter GREG KELLEY (Boston) has taken extended technique and preparation of the trumpet with various types of mutes to a new level and is a major new voice in improvised music. Kelley is a primary collaborator of microtonal saxophonist Bhob Rainey, and has also performed with Joe McPhee, Pauline Oliveros, Michael Zerang, Keiji Haino, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Gino Robair, Tom Nunn, Jack Wright, Steve Drury, Lawrence Cook, and many others.

Inventor ERIC LEONARDSON (Chicago) plays instruments of his own creation, largely focused on the sound potential of coiled metal springs. The resulting music is extremely varied, sometimes driving, sometimes somber and strangely atmospheric-and reflect Leonardson's skills as a drummer. He is an active member of the Chicago free improvisation community and performs frequently with vocalist Carol Genetti and other Chicago musicians.

JERRY LIM (Baltimore) is a musician, multimedia artist, and sometimes sidewalk surfer. He sometimes likes to think of himself and others as three-dimensional audible tactile holograms, and it shows in his music, which is extremely diffuse. He is the highly mobile guitarist in Companion Trio.

Master drummer TOSHI MAKIHARA (Philadelphia) is the exponent of an original musical style that combines vaudeville humor, a zen-influenced use of silence and gesture, and masterful free improvisation with a dazzling range of objects (ranging from drum kits to feather dusters to coiled slinkies, all used in unexpectedly perverse ways). He was a student of percussion with Sabu Toyozumi, one of the most prominent free improvisers in Japan. His performances are as much visual as sonic and span a wide range of collaborations, including work with William Parker (in Ye Ren), Eugene Chadbourne, John Berndt, and others. His is the founder of IMP, a presenting organization active in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia-based cornetist TODD MARGASAK has been imitating tea kettles, crickets, rip saws, crow calls and Clarence "Gene" Shaw for many years. But at High Zero, such representation should give way to registration of the sonic object.

Percussionist SEAN G. MEEHAN (NYC) has toured North America, Japan and Korea, performing solo and with local artists, including musicians and avant-garde flower arrangers. He is concerned with degrees of intention and its effect on music as both sound and performance.

A modern-day wandering troubadour of the apocalypse, SCOTT MOORE (NYC) is a sculptor, tubist, distinctly medieval front-man for demolition groups like Sink Manhattan and Ram Umbus, and also an organizer of radical avant-garde marching bands in NYC. His music involves vocalization, conventional and self-built instruments, and elemental sound sources like fire alarms and chains.

CATHERINE PANCAKE (Baltimore) is one of a new breed of improvising musician for whom the avant-garde serves as a base and inspiration; as a drummer, she is influenced equally by Sean Meehan, Bob Wagner and Michael Zerang (and possibly even Gene Krupa.) She is a self-taught percussionist seeking to approach musical possibilities of the sublime, extreme type; and also a prolific filmmaker and organizer.

GREG PIERCE (Pittsburgh) along with Michael Johnson, Greg Pierce is a founder of the brilliant radical film collective Orgone Cinema, and an equally brilliant musical ensemble with an ever-changing name (originally "The Pittsburgh Free Music Society.") A multi-instrumentalist playing saxophone, guitar and drums equally well, Pierce's music occupies the extreme "sound oriented" end of the spectrum, while simultaneously integrating technique influenced by his ability to play rock and bluegrass music, and by his conceptual film experiments and generally experimental disposition.

Microtonal Soprano Saxophonist BHOB RAINEY (Boston) has a highly developed and personal music, heavily influenced by his studies of non-western (microtonal) pitch relationships with Joe Maneri, and by the use of isolated, small sounds in the works of some modern classical composers such as John Cage and Morton Feldman. The formation and tour of Rainey's critically acclaimed group NMPERIGN with trumpeter Greg Kelley and drummer Tatsuya Nakatani, was one of the highlights of experimental music in 1998.

EVAN RAPPORT (Baltimore) plays alto, soprano and tenor saxophones, clarinet, and flute (often at the same time). As an improviser and composer he is concerned with cognitive dissonance and alien modes of thinking, although that doesn't keep him from playing in big bands and pit orchestras (witness his stint in the Tommy Dorsey Band). He is a member of the enigmatic Companion Trio, and Krill, and he performs in many other solo and collaborative contexts.

WILLIAM REDMAN (Baltimore) is drummer in The John Dierker Trio and International Soundscape Inter-nationale, and is also a developed composer and performer of intense solo work which encompasses equal influences from Jazz and avant-garde music.

As an improvising guitarist, JOHN SHIURBA (Oakland) has developed a unique and personalized approach to the instrument. Through the use of extended techniques and unusual preparations, he expands the traditional sound range of the instrument, producing stunning, often unrecognizable results. He has played with internationally acclaimed musicians such as Eugene Chadbourne, Marc Ribot and Peter Van Bergen, as well as many of the finest West Coast improvisers- Gino Robair, Dan Plonsey, Carla Kihlstedt, Myles Boisen, Tim Perkis, and Matthew Sperry to name a few.

BLAISE SIWULA (NYC) is an alto saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist/composer...Has played with and composed for a large number of players in NY and other regions. Blaise Siwula began improvising 30 years ago and hasn't regretted it once. He is an organizer of improvised music at ABC NO RIO in NYC, one of the longest running series dedicated to "very experimental" music.

Percussionist BOB WAGNER (Baltimore) is a pure natural, an enigma, a question mark. His drumming is deeply perplexing and seems to do injustice to musical parsimony while hitting it with a little plastic dog. He has been called "The Han Bennik of Hampden" because of his extreme use of dry humor in his music, and he can be heard on numerous records with his groups Companion Trio, The Can Openers, and The Recordings.

TODD WHITMAN (Buffalo) is one of the more obscure-and most formidable-musicians in North America. A player totally devoted to the art of free improvisation for the last twenty years, he only surfaces for very rare public concerts. There are no published recordings of his work. Whitman's sound (on a huge variety of reed instruments, electronics, and musical saws) has almost nothing to do with conventional music, being at once deeply animal and expressive, but also sonically exotic and even frightening at times. He is known for the strange structural development in his solos, as well as the shocking range of volumes which occur in his music from moment to moment. His music is at once deeply practiced and raw, naive, almost childlike.

An underground legend, JACK WRIGHT (Boulder) is considered by many of those who have heard him to be one of the most inspired musical voices of the century. Wright raises the art of free improvisation through the roof, gives it a whole new meaning and intensity-rather as John Coltrane did to Jazz. "His musical language has the shape of a stream of consciousness in which the colors are made by a big repertoire of 'strange' sounds, growls, overtones, multiphonics all played with strong feeling. He has very personal opinions about music and keeps himself out of the musical establishment to look for a more human and convivial relation with the listener"-Gianni Gebbia, Curva Minore, Italy, 1997.

MICHAEL ZERANG (Chicago) is one of the most original drummers in improvised music today, known for his work as a percussionist with Hamid Drake, Ken Vandermark, and Peter Brotzmann, among others. A Chicago-born Assyrian percussionist, improvisor and composer, he has co-founded and performed with countless groups, written over 100 original musical/sound compositions in collaboration with choreographers, theater companies, performance artists, new music ensembles, and film and video makers. His recent amazing trio with Dutch sound poet Jaap Blonk and Swedish Saxophonist Matts Gustaffson received substantial critical notice, despite being completely off-the-map musically.