If improvised experimental music is your thing, there's a local collective that wants to help you get out of your head.

Out of Your Head, an improvised experimental music collective, performs every Tuesday night at The Windup Space.  

The collective is 30 members strong, though not all members take the stage at once.

“It’s the same people every week,” said last week’s presenter, adding a bit paradoxically, “but never the same people together.”

Performing this last Tuesday was Mike Cherry on horns, switching between trumpet and pocket trumpet, Susan Alcorn on pedal steel, Dustin Carlson on guitar and Ethan Snyder on drums.

The performances are structured into two, hour-long sets with a short break between. The music itself is entirely unrehearsed and fully improvised. Everyone goes in blind. This raises an obvious bar of difficulty for the musicians, but generates sonically interesting results, if not always coherent.

Both style and quality varied throughout the sets. The toughest going moments were at each set’s beginning, where the musicians attempted to find and develop each other’s pace, ideas and intentions.

The first of the two sets started slow, graceful and tender – soft drones of Alcorn’s lap steel, pensive whisk’s from Snyder’s drum, Carlson’s diminutive guitar work, and the distanced shaping of Cherry’s pocket-trumpet – but built over time from what was reminiscent of Miles Davis’ "Sketches of Spain" into a kind of urban noir. More and more dissonance was slowly added, stretched and layered, and one felt it might have made the perfect soundtrack to the film Naked Lunch.

The set plateaued in trills from the trumpet, scratching and muted tapping from the lap steel, all together sounding as if the quartet were clockworks falling out gear and sprocket. Finally, they descended and returned for a time to the original feeling – slow, graceful and tender.

Around the 45 minute-mark, as if out of breath, the musicians ended in an observably spontaneous yet well synchronized close, and glanced around at each other, seeming to non-verbally confirm, “That’s that.”

Though the second set was much the same in that it was highly varied, it was not the same at all. As it goes with improvisation, the logic is differently developed every time.    

The overriding point is that one can’t know what to expect from such a performance. The performers themselves don’t even know.

Out of Your Head performs every Tuesday at The Windup Space, located at 12 W North Ave, Baltimore, MD 21218. Admission is free. Doors open at 9:30 p.m.