High Zero abounds with unique music

Before the start of the third act on the third day of the High Zero festival, four people stood on the stage. On the far left was Peter Jacquemyn of Brakel, Belgium who leaned against his towering double bass. Next to him stood LaDonna Smith, a violinist from Birmingham wearing maroon parachute pants and looking benevolent enough to be a friendly old neighbor.

After Smith came Baltimore native Che Davis, a man with long dreadlocks clothed in a simple green T-shirt. And finally, choosing to sit rather than stand, was C. Spencer Yeh, hunched over his violin as if he and his instrument were the last two thingsleft on earth.

The set began almost unexpectedly, with Smith, Yeh and Jacquemyn picking at the strings of their instruments, creating a sea of piquant notes and scratches. As the strings begin to growl and screech at each other, Davis blew into a crooked metal drainpipe, which produced a haunting dead air noise, like the sound of tension wires in the summertime. The noise tied all the petulant voices together in a writhing quartet that seemed to burst at the seams.

The rest of the set followed a violent course of heaves and sighs and hyperventilations. In one moment, the string section began ripping apart its instruments and in the next, they were caressing them in apologetic graces. When Smith began howling along with her violin, it was not an intrusion--rather, it seemed like the natural thing to do. Her screams became another element in the twisting, spiraling mess convulsing together and against itself at the same time. The audience watched music grow and unfold from seeds that were erratically sown by the performers.

The term "experimental music" has always carried its fair share of hesitations and connotations of being grating, glitchy and altogether unappealing.

Stereotypical improv artists are often portrayed as very colorful, very unkempt people who make music by sawing a violin bow around the edge of a drum cymbal or playing a trumpet through a balloon. While that may seem too esoteric for most, any form of experimental music becomes immediately accessible to anyone with an open and eager mind.

For four days of the year, the High Zero festival invades the Baltimore Theater Project, presenting a showcase of local and international artists joining forces to create improvised music and embrace their love for creative noise.

The first High Zero festival was held in 1999, manned by John Berdnt and Stewart Mostofsky under a group of Baltimore artists called the Red Room Collective. Now in its seventh year, it has become one of the biggest experimental music festivals in the nation, drawing some of the most revered artists from all over theworld, as well as creating a sizeable movement within the Baltimore community. This year, High Zero welcomed Japanese percussionist, Tatsuya Nakatani, and Lebanese trumpeter, Mazen Kerbaj, as well as artists from the Baltimore area, including Hopkins graduate Michael Muniak.

The festival is not merely a series of concerts, it's an artistic watering hole, where veterans mix with amateurs and admirers, all under a grand collective of experimental music. But aside from harvesting the scene, High Zero also aspires to bring newcomers into its fold.

Many of us go through life living by conventions, coloring inside the lines. From the moment we are born, we are raised to speak in a certain tone of voice and laugh a certain way. In middle school, we are taught to shuffle our feet when the electric slide comes on and slow dance to Mariah Carey. When it comes to music, we are raised to love songs with lyrics that have rhymes, empathetic pulses and constant harmonies that safely surround distinct melodies.

But living a life of conventions, while happy and safe, can become tedious. And the brain, with all its capacity for creativity can begin to feel the need to stretch beyond the confines of a mere riff, no matter how catchy.

Eventually, improvisation and experimentation will make their way into the foreground as a means to escape. Judging from the fervent applause of the audience at the High Zero festival, it seems that they have found what they are looking for in each act an outlet that may not always sound nice, that may not even sound like music, but sounds authentic, original and even liberating.

For Jacquemyn, Smith, Davis and Yeh their hypnotizing performance explains it all. In midst of the growing crescendo of their set, sounding more and more demonic, becoming more of a force than a song, a uniform message culminates and reverberates through the souls of their respective instruments. It's not always about making harmonies or melodies, and maybe it's not always about the audience. Maybe it's about the artist -- about throwing everything out there and not caring about who's listening. In the end, it's just about appreciating the noise.

After the final set is played, the audience makes its way outside the Theater Project and is greeted by the Baltimore night -- a lopsided cake covered in candles.