Friday February 27, 2026 | 8:00 pm | 10-20$ $liding scale
Drum Major Instinct – Jeff Arnal returns to Balt.
In the early days of the Red Room, one of the great bands to grace our stage once or twice a year was the John Dierker Quartet. Led by still-resident legendary reed player Dierker, this band played with unforgettable fury. A significant portion of that fury was from drummer Jeff Arnal – an absolutely mad percussionist with volcanic energy.
After studying with the late Milford Graves, Jeff journeyed around the country, eventually settling in western NC. Now he’s back to Baltimore with the duo “Drum Major Instinct” with synth player Curt Cloninger.
Opening the night will be a TBA Dierker led group. Don’t miss this combo of former collaborators and monster improvisors.
Drum Major Instinct is an experimental music duo from Asheville, North Carolina. Jeff Arnal plays (mostly) percussion and Curt Cloninger plays (mostly) modular synthesizer. The Wire describes Jeff’s drumming as a “highly original concept” having “a balletic sense of time and imaginative deployment of colour;” and Byron Coley says Curt’s modular synthesis “moves like blocks of radioactive adobe being shifted around by architects in space suits.” But, of course, nothing is ever that straightforward. The resultant music is about waves of energy, patterns within patterns (within patterns), sounds from the natural world, and running the voodoo down.
DMI’s second album Almost Nothing (2025) is available on vinyl and digital download from Haunted Apparatus.
DMI’s self-titled 2022 debut album is available on CD and digital download from Mahakala Music.
