Here, you'll learn about High Mayhem Festivals past and present. You can jump straight away to our next one by clicking here.

So we produce events of various scale and type year-round but every year we build the big one: an extended journey into sound, vision and well, High Mayhem.

So far, High Mayhem has produced five well-received Festivals in Santa Fe, the first was in 2002, here at the studios, in the early fall. We discovered that a great deal of under-represented, "experimental" artists and musicians sought a venue for their expression and that there happened to be quite a few interested in checking it out. In a Festival/Salon environment, artists, musicians and onlookers performed, hung-out and vibed on one-another. We borrowed some modest recording gear and gave documentation a shot.

That was not our first annual festival until our second annual fest came together in 2003 at The Center for Contemporary Arts, in what was then Theatre Grottesco's space. Thematically, it embraced the grassroots qualities of the previous fest, but in scope and quality it was a quantum leap. We thoroughly prepared for multi-tracking and multi-camera documentation.

It was clear that the Festivals were to be more than a presentation of musicians and artists who were doing some very new and interesting things with challenging ideas and/or emerging technologies (and sharing those elements with audience and fellow artists alike)- it was a three-day recording and shooting marathon. The fest' was a popular and critical success, and we captured it all. So from that, we released our first Festival Compilation a two disc set: one audio CD with programmed selections of highlights from each act, the other, a CD-ROM with MP3s of entire sets, some video and documentation of the promotional designs and other festival images. The response was much better than we could have imagined and we garnered international attention with the release.

Energized by an our self-fashioned, emerging tradition, in October 2004 we staged our third festival at The Paramount Club where, again, we comprehensively captured the much improvised emergent sights and sounds. This time the release is a three disc set and its release is imminent.

In 2005, October 7th through 9th we threw the fourth annual High Mayhem Emerging Arts Festival at the Wise Fool Performance Space. In keeping with our track-record, it was educational, diverse, challenging and really, really fun. It too, will bear an exhaustive document.