You may have missed it, but 2011 was the unofficial year of Microkingdom. The trio of Will Redman (drums, percussion), Marc Miller (guitar), and John Dierker (reeds) kicked off ’11 by releasing its second full-length album, Three Compositions of No Jazz (Friends Records), a beguiling mix of (more than three) tracks spanning lulling, almost lounge-y beauty (“Aire Metal”), mutant free-improv/groove (the two-part “Gamut Runner”), and other exotic sonic flavors. Sometimes as a duo without Dierker, sometimes expanded with additional players, they went on to play shows that found them on all manner of local bills. They were sandwiched between rock bands, part of the contemporary-music concert series Mobtown Modern playing Redman’s work (he has a Ph.D in composition), subsumed into a larger improvising ensemble for the annual Red Room holiday concert—and they never appeared out of place. The three principals all have long and varied resumes in the local music scene (most prominently Miller’s membership in dadaist rock trio Oxes and Dierker’s long-standing status as one of pianist Lafayette Gilchrist’s New Volcanoes), and somehow the various permutations they’ve weathered have shaped them into an apt house band for this particular moment in Baltimore music. They sat down recently in their practice space—the basement of Redman’s Gardenville home—for a chat frequently interrupted by tangents, jokes, and laughter; an edited and condensed version begins here.

City Paper : You put out a really good record at the beginning of the year, and it seemed like you played a lot in a lot of different contexts. Was there a plan to make more of a dent this year?

John Dierker: I think it just worked out that way. What do you guys think?

Marc Miller: I think it just worked out that way.

Will Redman: We planned to put the record out. I think we planned to play a little bit more, and didn’t.

MM: I don’t think we played any more or less than usual, but maybe we somehow got more attention for it when we played, which is awesome. I mean, we played better shows and were on better bills . . .

WR: And I think we’re finally starting to sink in a little bit.

MM: I wouldn’t say that. I think we’ve tried to position ourselves . . .

JD: For world domination.

MM: . . . for a diverse setting of shows. We like to think of ourselves as a band that can fit on any bill.

CP : Well, that seems to have been what happened. You played in all sorts of contexts and didn’t seem out of place in any of them, at least to me.

WR: Thank you.

MM: Thank you.

WR: That is intended. We did a Mobtown Modern thing, and we played with [Swedish psych group] Skull Defekts, and then did the Red Room thing. But we’ve always talked about not just being a [free] improv group, that there’s something else going on.

CP : Do you think that semi-ubiquity and that attention are a function of where things are with music in Baltimore these days, or is Microkingdom just a special snowflake and you’re finally getting what you’re due?

WR: We’re a special snowflake. (laughs) Just kidding. It is absolutely that everybody in the city that likes music likes music. It’s awesome. Say something better, Marc.

MM: I wanna take what he said and find a way to phrase it better, ’cause I know what he’s saying, but it wasn’t well phrased. So if you want to write something like that and credit to him . . .

WR: No, no,

MM: I do want to say that the next record we put out will have two words on a sticker on the cover: “special snowflake.”

CP : Marc and Will, you’ve known each other since high school and played together for years during the ’90s in International Soundscape Internationale, which was sort of an indie-rock band but also did lots of improvising and extra-musical pranks, like a song with a “sit-up solo.” It occurs to me that a lot of the stuff ISI did was sort of good prep for Microkingdom. Were the seeds of the current band sown in ISI?

WR: Well, I do want to point out that at the time we had ISI, I was also playing with John [Dierker] and John Hughes in the John Dierker Trio, which played at the old Ottobar a lot . . .

CP : That’s right.

WR: . . . but we’ve all been friends for a really long time. And if you look at the other bands in the scene back then—Haberdasher and Rhinovirus, particularly, because those guys and us were close friends—now you’ve got Russell [de Ocampo, formerly of Rhinovirus] who owns the Windup Space, you’ve got Thank You in that mix, you’ve got Oxes in that mix. So all these really interesting bands and people [who are still around]. And John’s been around since, like . . . I think he worked with Frederick Douglass down at the shipyards. (laughs)

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