Miya Masaoka

Koto, Electronics

NYC

Miya Masaoka resides in New York City and is a classically trained musician, composer and sound and instrument developer. She has created works for koto, laser interfaces, explosive powders, model trains, laptop and video. She has also created works for sculpture installations and notated scores for ensembles, chamber orchestra, mixed choirs and has led her own orchestra and small ensembles. Masaoka has performed with leading improvisers and artists working in jazz, new music and world traditions, including Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor; Steve Coleman, Pauline Oliveros, Andrew Cyrille, Reggie Workman, William Parker, Fred Frith, Larry Ochs, John Butcher, Peter Kowald, Christian Wolff, Gerry Hemingway, Samir Chatterjee, Zakir Hussein, Christian Wolff and Toshiko Akiyoshi, who wrote a piece for her. In addition, she has toured throughout India six times with Dr. L. Subramaniam.

Kenta Nagai

Fretless Guitar, Shamisen

NYC

Kenta Nagai is an audio-visual artist and performer, originally from Niigata Japan. His keen sense of physicality is reflected in his current exploration of the physical properties of sound and its impact on human emotion and the body. This interest has led to numerous collaborations with dancers throughout his career as an improvisor and performer in New York City and abroad. Nagai has appeared in numerous concerts at venues including Carnegie Hall, Roulette, Judson Church, Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, Lincoln Center Out Door Stage, Rubin Museum, Hershhorn Museum at Smithonian Institute, Sculpture Center and Japan Society.

Morten Olsen

Drums, Supercollider 3

Norway / Berlin

Percussion, drums, vibes, electronics, computer, comrade. A musician, sometimes composing, once in a blue moon involved in other arts. Born in Stavanger, Norway, in 1981. He has lived 5 years in Amsterdam and is since 2006 based in Berlin. His father is diagnosed with Chron's disease, his mother is a retired government official and his older brother a banker. Olsen studied the piano from the age of 6 and from the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics. In his teens, he acquired a taste for avant-garde composers, 1960s free-jazz music and atheism. He noticed churches being burnt around him but only later realized black metal subconsciously had influenced him. He began writing classical music in high school, while at the same time playing drums in various free-rock bands as well as working with an americana artist. In 2001 he left Stavanger to study in Amsterdam, met Koen Nutters on the first night there and instantly became a founding member of the N-Collective.

Tom Boram

Prepared Piano, Tap Shoes

Baltimore, MD

Tom Boram is also known as Tom Borax. Using analogue and digital electronics combined with acoustic instruments and customized interfaces, he pursues an expanding vocabulary of animal sounds, body sounds, household sounds and perforated rhythm. The ideal performance, in his opinion, should combine a pinch of sublime and/or mysterious melody, a dash of timbral dynamism, a smidgeon of curious and/or preposterous gestures, a dollop of blinding amplitude, a twist of haunted emptiness, a shake of exfoliating abrasive salt, a packet of canine bombast and exuberance, and lastly equal droplets of hypnotic inharmony and syncopated arrhythmia in a base of the putrid and sexy essence of vibratory accidents. His current projects include leprechaun catering and snacks, with dollops, smidgeons and smatterings of tons of other things.

Rose Hammer Burt

Reeds

Baltimore, MD

Born and raised in the western United States, Rose moved to the east coast in 2000 when her strong interest in music led her to pursue a degree in classical saxophone performance at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. At Peabody, she became increasingly involved with the Jazz and Computer Music departments, and upon completion of her undergraduate degree, Rose enrolled in the Masters program in Computer Music. Encouraged by several faculty members and fellow students to explore improvisation further, she became involved with experimental music at the Red Room, and was invited to join the Red Room collective and High Zero Foundation in the spring of 2005. She performs in Death in the Maze, the Baltimore Afrobeat Society, Second Nature, Multiphonic Choir and the After Now series.

Melissa Moore

Electronics, Turntable

Baltimore, MD

Melissa Moore is a self-taught installation/sound artist, and sculptor was born in Washington DC and now makes her home in Baltimore, MD. Moore's gallery and performative sound work ranges from noisey finger-pickin folk guitar, banjo, invented instruments, voice, turntables, and electronics including music based in field recording composition. Her composed work involves the magnification of minute sound sources, focusing attention on the physical properties of materials and unusual acoustic phenomena in a reductive and elemental way. She is also interested in the seemingly unlikely intersection of traditional musics combined with electronic music. Her current music and performance work involves machine-sewn, clear-vinyl portable structures of her own design and construction. There is multi-disciplinary approach to her work, paying careful attention to the intersection of sound, architecture, and installation.

Killick

Harpeggione

Athens, GA

Killick’s music reminds us that as 21st century members of the global village, we cannot rely on our artists to do the work of transformation for us. In the same way we cannot rely on a savior-president or a tribal shaman to make us whole. But we can each enter the depths of human experience to find the hidden wounds draining our souls’ life blood, wounds that are reducing us to ghosts in a world stripped of diversity and the irrevocable connection between all living things. Our suffering might then have a purifying effect, making sacred again a land where we may prosper in the presence of all beings. Killick’s music invites us to go beyond usual categories of experience. He offers us a guiding thread on the difficult path back to the human heart and affirms that it is possible to return with the medicine of compassionate consciousness ready for action.

The 11th Annual High Zero Festival

Festival of Experimental Improvised Music

Baltimore, MD

High Zero is the premier festival of Improvised, Experimental music on the East Coast, being fully devoted to new collaborations between the most inspired improvisors from around the world.

Lasting two weeks in total, the festival brings together 28 core musicians each year, but also involves a much larger subculture of musicians in Baltimore and on the East Coast. Unlike many related festivals, High Zero is not narrow in terms of sensibility or subculture, but rather widely inclusive of all the different types of experimental music-making in the moment. The fact that half of the festival's core participants are from Baltimore speaks to the depth of Baltimore's experimental music subculture, which in recent years has grown to be one of the richest cities in the country for experimental art.

The festival has a unique structure. High Zero is focused solely on new collaborations in freely improvised experimental music. Internationally famous musicians play side by side with younger "unknowns," united by their commitment to the musical imagination. Each year, Baltimore becomes a fertile meeting-ground for a large group of inspired players, drawn from a fascinating international subculture.

The festival exposes large audiences to this radical music in its pure form. Large-scale public concerts, recording sessions, workshops, and guerilla street performances are all part of the heady mix. The players are carefully selected by the festival's organizers for their intense, unique music, whether it is based around dramatic intensity, humor, specially designed instruments, original approach, raw sound, or nearly superhuman instrumental technique. The resulting collaborations challenge the limits of music and delight by their audacity, expressiveness, immediacy, and innovation. It isn't about stars or established projects; it is about the most uncompromising and stimulating new improvised music we can bring together.

To say the High Zero Festival is an unusual event is an understatement. Not only does the festival intend to provide the audience with extremely varied, inspired and ingenious experiences, it is also a major challenge for the improvisors, who are put in contexts where their stock personal musical languages may not work, pushing them into terra incognita.

Participate

High Zero is not only weird, sophisticated, and over the top--it is also broadly participatory and deeply community based. Its both in the spirit of festival to have all sorts of ways for people to get involved, and also very much a practical necessity to launch of festival of this size on our limited budget. If you want to get involved creatively and/or just help out, we would love to have you. Here are some of the things you can do:

Volunteer

We organize the festival year round on a volunteer basis but starting a month before the festival we need 20-30 smart, reliable people to sign up to help with a variety of tasks: selling and taking tickets, giving rides to the airport, helping with stage management, installations, housing musicians, and other tasks. Its fun and more importantly it helps the festival out a lot. People who volunteer get a free ticket to a night of the festival for every day they volunteer.

Perform

While the main stage is invitation-only and booked a year in advance, there are many opportunities to perform at High Zero through High Jinx, our broadly participatory, informal and unofficial site specific and street performances held throughout the city starting a week before the festival, which are some of the wildest and most inspired public art events in Baltimore. Participate at your own risk!

Donate

Yup, we need money. We get a huge amount done for every dollar donated and have almost no waste. Click here to support us and we will be forever grateful! (Please note that we would love to have a real endowment, if you are really wealthy and would like to see this continue for the next decade.)

Tickets

Single day passes are no longer available online. Tickets may be available at the box office.

Tickets

Festival passes have sold out.

High Zero in the News


"Weekend Pick"
The New York Times, Mid-atlantic edition, September '06

"Could there possibly be a better place for a festival of cutting edge, improvised music than Baltimore? ...four days of wildly adventurous and completely extemporaneous music..."
Washington Post, September '06

"Baltimore is more and more becoming a crucible for serious experimental music produced outside of academia and concert halls."
ArtPapers, January '07

"High Zero has become one of the premier festivals for experimental music in North America, pulling in fans and musicians from all over the U.S. and the rest of the world every September."
Stylus Magazine, September '06

"No one walked away disappointed, as this year's first annual High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music left the large crowds at every session enthralled."
Steve A. Loewy, Cadence Magazine, '99

"A striking glimpse into the avant-garde and a creative process limited only by the reach of the imagination."
Tim Smith, The Baltimore Sun, '00
Miya Masaoka
Kenta Nagai
Morten Olsen
Tom Boram
Rose Hammer Burt
Melissa Moore
Killick

About

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In the News

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