So this just in: this is the line-up of the 10th year of our charmed city’s High Zero Festival, hosted by the Red Room.  It showcases all that is good and right and discomforting in music experimentation. I’m excited for Arrington de Dionyso, eccentric, Tuvan-throat-singing front-man of the jaw-dropping, intimidating well-spring of experimental rockknown as Old Time Relijun (Wiki).

Enjoy these tracks off their 2007 LP Catharsis in Crisis and read on for the full festival line-up.

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MP3: Old Time Relijun – Indestructible Life

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MP3: Old Time Relijun – Veleno Mortale

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

“Some of the most intense new music being made anywhere, on everything from oboes and one-of-a-kind instruments to the human body itself… unforgettable performances.” -The Washington Post

“A fertile laboratory of musical possibility without equal.” -Signal to Noise Magazine

“So highly singular that it corresponds to nothing that has been heard before.” -Maryland Public Television

Baltimore’s High Zero Festival—one of the longest running and most successful festivals of experimental improvised music in the country and what City Paper called “one of Baltimore’s great cultural treasures” and Baltimore Magazine called “Best Music Festival”—is entering its tenth year.The critically acclaimed festival pulls out all the stops presenting six days of inspired live music featuring special programming legendary performers such as 1st generation Fluxus artist Olga Adorno from France, minimalist icon Tony Conrad from Buffalo, Baltimore conceptualist Jennifer Graf Sheppard, and visionary Philadelphia film-maker Peter Rose, as well as the freshest homegrown & international improvisers—all in the town Rolling Stone calls “The Best Music Scene” in the country. And it is.

The High Zero Festival gathers avant-garde musicians each year from around the world for a series of concerts featuring startlingly new ad hoc collaborations, virtually taking over the city. This year’s festival will open with a special works by Adorno, Conrad, and Rose, beginning with a special opening concert at the Fox Court of The Baltimore Museum of Art, followed by five days of intensive improvised music concerts featuring artists from as far away as Africa and Japan at Theatre Project and all over the city, including numerous street performances.

Attendance of the High Zero Festival in previous years has been exceptionally high for this non-commercial music, with the festival frequently selling out. A weekend pick in the New York Times and regularly covered by major European and U.S. magazines, the festival is an outgrowth of the vital weekly Red Room performance series at Normals Books and Records, which since 1996 has presented roughly 700 concerts of experimental music in Baltimore, making it one of the longest running series of its kind in the country.

For more information contact:

High Zero Foundation, Inc.

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