The High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music begins Thursday, Sept. 18th and runs through Sunday, Sept. 21. Now in its 27th year, the High Zero Festival is one of the most unusual music festivals in the country, presenting exclusively improvised performances featuring 22 invited artists in fresh ensembles each night, prioritizing combinations of performers that have never been heard before.

This year, 11 artists from Beijing, Tokyo, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and other cities will join 11 artists from Baltimore. Each artist performs three times during the four-night festival. See the full performer list here. Guests include experimental musicians, dancers, intermedia artists, performance artists, and more. Some artists come from traditional classical and jazz training, while others are entirely self-taught. Some use new instruments they’ve invented. All create music with strikingly diverse techniques that produce wildly varied performances.

Every year, the festival highlights Baltimore as home to highly unusual, risk-taking, and adventurous artists and productions, as the city becomes a fertile meeting ground for a large group of inspired players, drawn from a fascinating international subculture. HighZero unabashedly caters to adventurous audiences and prides itself on diverse rosters that celebrate local performers alongside international greats, offering a major challenge for the improvisers, who are put in contexts where their stock personal musical languages may not work, pushing them into terra incognita. The results are often magical.