Friday July 11 * doors at 6:40, music at 7 * $15-20

Joseph Allred is a Tennessee-based guitarist, singer, multi-instrumental composer, and visual artist with deep roots in the Upper Cumberland region of Tennessee and Kentucky. Their guitar playing draws from diverse musical styles including Appalachian folk, bluegrass, blues, flamenco, and classical guitar, as well as from folk iconoclasts John Fahey and Robbie Basho, figures of the 20th century avant-garde like Albert Ayler, Derek Bailey, and Henry Flynt, and the musical traditions of India, Iran, and the Arab world. They have released music on Feeding Tube Records, Worried Songs, Scissor Tail Editions, AKTI, Island House, Blue Hole Recordings, Centripetal Force, Garden Portal, Reverb Worship/Future Grave, and their own Meliphonic Records imprint.

Growing up in the Annapolis area and attending University of Maryland with friend and labelmate Robbie Basho, Max Ochs contributed two tracks for the 1967 "Contemporary Guitar" on John Fahey’s Takoma label. Inspired by his friend Fahey, Ochs developed his own interest in fingerstyle guitar, learning from one of the masters, Mississippi John Hurt, during a one-month residency in Ochs’ New York apartment when Hurt reappeared on the folk scene in 1964. Ochs was also performing with the legendary band, Seventh Sons, founded by Greenwich Village mainstay and early folk innovator Buzzy Linhart. Seventh Sons were a massively popular NYC band during the years of 1962-1964, recording tracks for Capitol Records for their debut record, which was scrapped after Ochs left the band and New York. Ochs has continued recording and performing in his spare time, releasing music on the Fonotone and Tompkins Square labels, and with collaborators like Neil Harpe and an up-and-coming group called Rugburn.

Since 2003, Philadelphia-based improv ensemble Kohoutek has constructed a dynamic, stylistic range of abstract sound, consisting of textural drone, atmospheric rock, harsh noise freakouts, clattering percussion, guitar heroics and alien electronics, all congealing to form a multihued psychedelic extravaganza. Inspired by such varied musical entities as Can, Amon Duul 2, Trad Gras Och Stenar, Dead C, Sun City Girls, Hawkwind, This Heat, Sun Ra, Art Ensemble of Chicago, and King Crimson, they inhabit a world of murky terrain where drone, musique concrete and noise coalesce with cosmic folk, where doom and sludge metal merge with fiery jazzoid polyrhythms. All Kohoutek performances are rituals channeling untapped energy transmogrified through pure expression and response to the immediate environment.