Thus featuring Neil Feather and John Berndt
Traum from Detroit, Michigan

8pm at Fairchild Chapel

Neil Feather and John Berndt have collaborated since 1994 as THUS, using their unique, self-built instrumentation to develop their own idiom of otherworldly music. Like a civilization of two, like a cargo cult in reverse...

Sound mechanic Neil Feather has been creating radical and unusual musical instruments for thirty years, and is increasingly known outside of Baltimore as one of the most original musical thinkers of his day. His instruments each embody uniquely clever acoustic and engineering principles, and are visually arresting. The music he plays on the instruments is equally original, embodying new principles and resulting in a nearly alien idiom of music. A founding member of Thus and The Official Project, as well as the leader of Aerotrain, he has a long history of collaborative projects and solo concerts.

John Berndt is a musician and organizer based in Baltimore, Maryland who is best known as an extended-technique experimental saxophonist and electronic musician. As an enfant terrible, he participated in what might be called the second wave of the neoism cultural movement. Berndt participated in the "86th International Neoist Apartment Festival" in 1986 in Berlin, & the "One Millionth" in New York City in late 1988. Subsequently becoming a respected businessman and grafting those skills onto his avant-garde roots, Berndt, one member of a collective of artists and improvising musicians in the spirit of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, works on the Red Room experimental performance series, which has presented weekly events since the early 1996, and the High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music, a large annual improvised music festival begun in 1999 in Baltimore where all performers play in new groups. He also runs the Recorded record label which has issued several discs by Berndt's sometime collaborator Henry Flynt.

TRAUM is Ben Hall and Hans Buetow of Graveyards and Mêlée plus local favorite Chris Riggs. John Olson of Wolf Eyes says that their work "sounds like some Bailey shit but without all that art shit."

Truant Runts with Jack Wright and Michael Johnsen
Don Ayler's Psychosis from Oberlin, Ohio

8pm at The Cat in the Cream Coffeehouse

TRUANT RUNTS is Michael Johnsen and Jack Wright, who have been playing together since 2000 and have toured in the US and Europe, sometimes adding French trumpet player, Sebastian Cirotteau. As a duo they have created a CD on the Sprout label by that name.

Jack Wright taught at various universites in the 1960s, and left academia in the early 1970s to engage in radical politics. By the late 1970s he directed his energies into playing the saxophone, which had been his childhood dream. He is today one of a very small group of musicians in North America that has played improvised music exclusively since that time. Through years of near constant touring, often performing for audiences in cities and towns where improvised music had never before been heard, he came to be regarded as an underground legend, the "Johnny Appleseed of Improvised Music". He has deliberately eschewed the conventions and socio-aesthetic limitations of musical careerism to pursue his own vision. Although his de-professionalized approach sets him apart from most musicians at his level of accomplishment, his art has always grown, expanded, and synthesized new information. He is unquestionably an original and virtuosic saxophonist, a master improviser who is deeply lyrical, with humor never far away.

Michael Johnsen was born in 1968 to two German immigrants in Pittsburgh, where he continues to live. Over the past several years he has wired together an melange of analog electronic devices for live performance, whose highly idiosyncratic behaviors are revealed through their complex interactions. As an antidote to all that wire, he is equally devoted to the saw, a simple folk instrument. He is especially fond of putting himself in difficult, confusing situations. Most of what he might have learned has come from the so-called natural world, like watching robins run. "My favorite sound is the one that's over."

DON AYLER'S PSYCHOSIS performs ritualized improvisation. Through wayward stabs at solar divination, the group encourages you to witness absolute presence all of the time.

Death in the Maze of Baltimore, MD
Aaron Dilloway formerly of Wolf Eyes

8pm at Fairchild Chapel

DEATH IN THE MAZE is Baltimorians Rose Hammer (Baritone & alto sax), Samuel Burt (clarinets), John Berndt (alto and soprano sax) and Paul Neidhardt (percussion), playing occult (in the sense of "not revealed") chamber improvisation of the highest order. Combing elements of topiary aesthetics with eerie winds Scottish that steal your pocket watch, but during a Tibetan funeral at least 200 years ago. Once you get in, no way out.

AARON DILLOWAY is the former guitarist and tape manipulator of the noise group Wolf Eyes. Currently, he runs the noise label and mail-order Hanson Records, which he began in 1994, and performs solo using eight track tapes and vocal sounds. He also records modular synthesizers as Spine Scavenger, and with an ever-changing cast of sound artists as The Nevari Butchers.

Traum featuring members of Graveyards, Mêlée
Aaron Dilloway formerly of Wolf Eyes

8pm at The Cat in the Cream Coffeehouse

TRAUM is Ben Hall and Hans Buetow of Graveyards and Mêlée plus local favorite Chris Riggs. John Olson of Wolf Eyes says that their work "sounds like some Bailey shit but without all that art shit."

AARON DILLOWAY is the former guitarist and tape manipulator of the noise group Wolf Eyes. Currently, he runs the noise label and mail-order Hanson Records, which he began in 1994, and performs solo using eight track tapes and vocal sounds. He also records modular synthesizers as Spine Scavenger, and with an ever-changing cast of sound artists as The Nevari Butchers.