FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
 
2008 edition of Baltimore’s High Zero Festival embraces broad range of "experimental culture" with four very special 10th anniversary artists

Just Added! A special performance of the Second Nature Orchestra with filmmaker Peter Rose at the Baltimore Museum of Art on Sept 16th!
 
Event: Baltimore’s 10th Anniversary High Zero Festival
 
Free Admission Opening Show:
Sept 16th
@ Baltimore Museum of Art
w/ Peter Rose and the Second Nature Orchestra
 
Primary Concerts:
Sept 17th - 21st
@ Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. Baltimore, MD
          		  Individual tickets: $12/regular, $10/student or senior
          		  Festival Pass: $50
 
			All online purchases add $1 per individual ticket and $3 for a festival pass for the cost of the online purchase.
 
			Contact: info@redroom.org, 443 414 5414
 
To help celebrate the 10th annual High Zero Festival of Experimental and Improvised Music, four celebrated avant-garde performers -- Olga Adorno, Tony Conrad, Peter Rose, and Jenny Graf Sheppard -- have been commissioned to create unique works in Baltimore.
At age 86, Olga Adorno continues to create highly unusual works that blur the boundaries of art and lived experience. Canadian performance artist Eric Letourneau has said that, "Olga Adorno is a living performance, a non-stop improvisation every day of her life". A legendary artist, she was one of the first, most important, and simultaneously least documented of the generation of New York artists associated with Fluxus and The Happenings in the 1960s. Her pivotal performances, at Judson Church and other legendary NYC art spots, helped to define the lyrical side of the post-Cage / post-Modern performance sensibility. Born in Puerto Rico and now living in France, Ms. Adorno will be a special artist at this year's High Zero Festival spontaneously creating work involving the musicians from the festival and providing ineffable experiences that will help to structure the festival.
Tony Conrad is one of the most important and influential artists of the later 20th and 21st centuries. Having a profound impact on video art, filmmaking, and music, Conrad is perhaps best known as the director of The Flicker and a former member of the Theatre of Eternal Music along with La Monte Young and John Cale as well as for his classic 1973 collaboration with Krautrock band Faust. He is considered an icon of minimalist music, though his work in video is just as intense. As he says, “Video is where all of the moving image ideas accumulate, like a network of little eddies strewn up and down the mainstream. And if perhaps video discourse once seemed to bobble like a bit of surface foam on the deeper cultural current—now, more and more, we see it filling out a complex 200-year-old technological and social history.” Conrad exhibits widely and is a faculty member in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo.
Philadelphia filmmaker and performance artist Peter Rose has produced incisive and visionary films that raise intriguing questions about the nature of time, space, light, and perception. Having a profound interest in language as a subject and in video as a medium, Rose has generated a substantial body of work playing with the feel and form of sense. For High Zero 2008, Rose will be producing a new film for his Fuluminations Series involving gorgeous illuminations of Baltimore’s city architecture. On the opening night at the BMA, the film will form the backdrop of a performance by Second Nature -- Baltimore's free improvisational orchestra comprised of fifteen exceptional local improvisers.
Baltimore conceptual musician Jenny Graf Sheppard is deservedly well-known around the country for her distinctive and highly imaginative approaches to social experimentation, performance, and collaboration. As one half of two amazing duos, Metalux and Harrius, Sheppard is on the forefront of popular experimental music -- seamlessly combining American folk music sensibilities with far-out experimentation and punishing noise. She has also spearheaded a number of significant projects including the recent film Proud Flesh (with co-director Chiara Giovando) as well as a visionary project to engage nursing home residents with electric guitars. For this edition of High Zero, Sheppard will curate the Saturday matinee show, which has historically broken format with the festival to present exotic compositions.
 
High Zero 2008, 10th Anniversary Edition
 
Special 10th anniversary artists:
 
Olga Adorno, Nice France
 
Tony Conrad, Buffalo NY
 
Peter Rose, Philadelphia
 
Jenny Graf Sheppard, Baltimore

Festival musicians from outside Baltimore:
 
Tetuzi Akiyama (acoustic guitar), Japan
 
Liz Albee (trumpet), San Francisco
 
Magali Babbin (amplified metal), Montreal
 
Tony Buck (drums), Berlin
 
Carbon (electronics, tapes), NYC
 
Chris Corsano (drums), Scottland
 
Lucas Crane (tapes), NYC
 
Arrington de Dionysio (voice, bass clarinet), Portland OR
 
Bill Nace (guitar), North Hampton, MA
 
Robert Van Heuman (electronics), Amsterdam
 
Camel Zekri (oud, guitar, electronics), North Africa
 
Dan Blacksberg (trombone), Philadelphia

 
Festival performers from Baltimore:
 
Susan Alcorn (pedal steel guitar)
 
John Berndt (saxophones, inventions, electronics)
 
Tom Boram (synthesizer, voice)
 
Alessandro Bosetti (electronics, voice)
 
Samuel Burt (clarinets, electronics)
 
Audrey Chen (voice, cello, electronics)
 
John Eaton (alto saxophone, voice)
 
Carson Garhart (inventions, electronics)
 
Rose Hammer (saxophones)
 
Janel Leppin (cello, electronics)
 
Michael Muniak (electronics)
 
Paul Neidhardt (percussion, friction)
 
Ric Royer (voice, tapes)
 
Martin Schmidt (electronics)

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