Think Rive Gauche between the wars, or Prague towards the end of the 19th century. Think of any place where the frills that adorn an upper-class arts or intellectual community have been clipped, and the most important thinkers and artists of the era have given up the life of the salon for a seedier existence, where the creative take inspiration from the poor, and the ethos is one of abjection rather than refinement. Think of any of these places, and the picture will look at least a little bit like what is going on in Baltimore today, where a community of avant-garde thinkers and performers based around experimental music and sound is gaining momentum.
In 1990, a group of seven friends who were influenced by a "wide variety of nonconformist sensibilities," and looking to live lives "uncluttered by modernist naivete or post-modernist cynicism" opened Normal's Books and Records on 31st Street near the corner of Greenmount. Seven years later, the Normal's collective bought the space located next door to the book shop and renovated it into the Red Room performance space, a venue that has since hosted over 350 performances of experimental and improvisational music. These are live events that blur the lines between concerts and performance art, of sounds that most people's ears would reject as harsh, dissonant noise.
John Berndt, a 36-year-old CEO of an Internet marketing firm, part-time musician and artist, is one of the original founders of Normal's and managed the Red Room for the first year of its existence. Berndt understands that his passion for experimental music is shared by a very small minority. "Most people who aren't into experimental music think it's really dry. I think it's anything but dry. It gets into rooms of the mind that we, as people, don't usually go into; it's about having a richness of perception that you don't get through other types of music or art."
Today, Normal's is still located near one of the rougher sections of Greenmount Avenue, with several bombed-out blocks a few hundred feet away and graffiti-scarred walls across the street. The bookshop and record store section of the store is familiarly dusty and cluttered with liberal political posters, old campy board games, and the like. The Red Room itself feels like a hipster's living room, with a drop-down projector and a sound system alongside comfortable furniture and the furry smell of cats. In this unlikely setting of urban kitsch and decay, the Red Room has nurtured a fecund artistic community where dialogue about important concepts and cutting-edge ideas happens on a regular basis. The "Crap Shoot" workshop for "freely improvised music" happens once a month, and is a chance for inexperienced musicians to meet the veterans of the scene, form collaborations, and learn about the music and the ideas associated with it. "A lot of people who come to the workshops end up on stage with the older guys at some point," says Berndt. Since 1998, the Red Room has been run by a collective of seven artists and enthusiasts, including Berndt.
But outside of Greenmount, the experimental music scene seems to be enjoying something of a gilded age, as what was once underground is becoming less and less so. In the past few years especially, new performance venues for experimental music have opened up, including Tarantula Hill in West Baltimore, An Die Musik Downtown, and True Vine Records in Hampden, and other venues have started to add free improvisation to the list of musics they promote. The Talking Head rock club in Mt. Vernon and even Bertha's Mussels in Fells Point have opened their doors to experimental acts, making the music that was once limited to the Red Room into the music that Baltimore is known for.
The volume of music being produced has gone up as well, with more recordings from local "free" musicians appearing every month. Normal's and True Vine sell free-form records by The Dorkestra, Snacks, Berndt's band Monad, Nautical Almanac, and veteran scenester John Dierker, among others. Berndt says that more and more young people have become interested in the music and are coming to the workshops and performances. "We've got about three or four good players from Peabody, four or five from JHU, and UMBC has produced, I'd say, six to eight musicians who are really involved in the scene."
Josh Atkins, a senior at Hopkins, plays guitar in the experimental/improv band Atta Stratta, who have performed at the True Vine. The band started in the summer of 2003 and includes Hopkins seniors Greg Druck (drums) and Mike Muniak (laptop, electronics) and Greg Pizzoli (vocals), all of whom have gotten involved in the experimental music scene and have played and attended shows at the Red Room. "I like [the music] because its kind of a direct expression of emotion. There are no barriers or preconceived notions about how one part is going into another. It shows more about the artist than other type of music, in my opinion." Atta Stratta started playing progressive rock, but at some point all four members became interested in free improvisation. "We stopped writing songs in the traditional sense," says Atkins, "and just started playing and seeing what happened."
The Collective Spirit of Experimentalism
Why Baltimore? Why has this city, in particular, been such a good home to this type of music? "I think it's a historical accident of there having been a lot of avant-garde art happening here in the '70s and '80s," says Berndt. "Baltimore is also a place that has a higher possibility [than other cities] of having a collective spirit. There's a number of factors that go into this, including the low rent, but there has been a very, very concerted effort, most notably on the part of the Red Room Collective, to develop the scene."
A "collective spirit" may seem like the type of attitude that would facilitate a lot of different types of artistic development but it seems particularly suited to the avant-garde. "Outside of Baltimore it's typical for experimental music to be divided into specific cliques, like 'experimental rock' or 'experimental jazz'," says Berndt. Here, a music that sort of defies an idiomatic label has been embraced by a wide variety of people. It seems that a lot of Baltimore artists are simply devoted to a form of musical expression that is defined only by its improvisational nature and it's failure to conform with most traditions of modern, classical, or popular musics.
The culmination of all these collective efforts is the High Zero Festival, which starts its sixth year on Thursday, Sept. 30. The festival is an opportunity for experimental musicians from all over the country to meet and play together. Some of the performances feature the more typical experimental honk-fests and dissonant, grating electro-sounds, while others include invented instruments and non-conventional ways of playing traditional instruments.
Last year, the organizers staged High Zero "hi-jinks," where musicians would set up on street corners throughout the Inner Harbor and blast passers-by with strange sounds and musical noises.
This year's High Zero festival includes three gallery installations, the most extensive and challenging of which is designed by Berndt and a music composition graduate student at the Peabody Conservatory named Samuel Bert. The piece, which is on display at the Contemporary Museum, is known as Speakeroids, and consists of a large cubic frame made out of PVC piping, with "acoustically complicated objects" suspended from the pipes and wired together in circuits to a computer. Each "object" is different. One is a large rectangular metal plate, hanging an inch from the innards of a speaker with a styrofoam cone in between. Another is a 22-inch ride cymbal, likewise placed close to a speaker, and grounded to the floor with a wire attached to a chunk of mortared brick wall. Another is a piece of sheet glass, and two of the objects have drums as their base objects.
When this motley machine, which is inspired by the Rube Goldberg machines of the 1960s, is turned on, the objects begin to create feedback loops based on their resonance frequencies. As one object feeds back at a particular frequency, the sound it produces cause another object to resonate and generate another sound, and another piece of "spectral music." Each object acts as both a microphone and a speaker, and the sounds they produce are sometimes loud and harsh, sometimes rustling and dry, like grass in the wind, sometimes siren-like, and occasionally consonant and beautiful.
"There's a very abstract thing going on here," says Berndt, "and the objects have a physical presence. One way of thinking of what's going on is that all objects and spaces resonate to various degrees. The Grand Canyon or a big church have obvious resonace spaces, but so does a pencil or a teapot." The feedback creates interesting rhythmic effects too, as the sounds pulse and waver.
"I'm generally interested in possibilty outside of conformist reservations. I'm interested in all the different things that someone can experience or understand, and I want to sensitize people to the fact that normal experience is already pretty strange, but it's so familiar to us that it doesn't register," says Berndt. "Hopefully, [the installation] is a pretty strange experience for people." In this way, Berndt takes everyday experience, in this case, the perception of sound, and puts it under a microscope in a way that makes people somewhat uncomfortable. His art is eloquent, odd, and frustrating to get your head around. As I sat in the center of the installation, looking at the rattling nodes above my head, I found myself pondering the randomness of the sounds. The "acoustically complicated objects" seemed alienated from the effects they were producing, yet the whole work felt oddly natural.
The Experimental Craft
When I arrive outside the Contemporary Museum this past Tuesday, Berndt and Bert have their instruments ready. After a brief greeting, they launch into an imrovisational session, and the sounds they produce are eerie, complex and unlike anything I've ever heard. Berndt makes "multiphonic" noises on his vintage-looking alto saxophone, using a technique he calls "tricking the instrument" with complex fingerings to produce more that one note at a time. He intermittently clucks his tongue against his reed and closes his throat, creating a bird-like percussive honk. Bert uses some of the same techniques on his clarinet, but stays for the most part to the higher register of the instrument, playing controlled squawks and long, sustained tones.
Berndt says his goal for the music is to explore "the possibility of emotional expression divorced from any musical system. What free musicians do is find ways to have authentic or self-expressional music without building on any specific set vocabulary." He contrasts experimental music with the Blues or ethnic music like that of the South Indian tradition. Those styles, he says, are based on a traditional set of norms from the past, while free improvisation uses no objectified rules to guide its trajectory.
Samuel Bert, his partner in the installation, says that he became interested in experimental music while attending the University of Georgia. "I compose highly complex, highly notated music, so the improvisational style is like composing in real time, and it's nice to share that process with other people." He likes playing this type of thing in Baltimore because "it's more mature here ... people have been doing it longer here, and there is a larger listening base." Berndt estimates that when Normal's was started, there were only about five experimental musicians in the city, compared to about 40 today.
We go inside the museum, and the two improvizers remove the mouthpieces from their instruments and begin to blow across their openings, trying various fingerings while humming into the bodies of the instruments. They tell me that using their instruments in non-conventional ways is a huge part of experimental music. The sounds they produce are breathy, thin and hollow. I look to the photographer standing by my side, gaping at the artists as they gyrate with the emotions of their craft. He looks back at me in disbelief, mouthing silently, "What the hell?"
Berndt can respond to reactions like these: "There's a fundamental issue of sensibility at hand, here. Some people grew up in a world where everything made sense and seemed perfectly comfortable: the culture, the people, the way of life. Other people, like me, think outside of that norm, and it's never gotten boring for me." And in that moment, he has encapsulated the vision of his movement. If there is one form of art to which the Baltimore community can claim one of the world's richest contributions, it is John Berndt's art. And its growing popularity, as hard to swallow as the music may be, is an indication that perhaps he's onto something. "I think people are really hungry for an authentic experience," he says. "The only contradiction here is that they're hungry for something that is moving contrary to the direction of their own culture."
John Berndt performs tonight, Thursday, Sept. 23, at XandO's caf?? in Charles Village.
