Catherine Pancake is one of a new breed of improvising musicians for whom the avant-garde serves as a practical technical base and inspiration. She is an autodidact percussionist and a sound artist using elemental forces (water, dry ice) seeking to approach musical possibilities of the sublime, extreme type; and also a prolific filmmaker and a central organizer
of the Baltimore scene. She is a member of Neil
Feather's Aerotrain and the Coltrane tribute group
Music in the Key of Zero with saxophonist John Berndt(with whom she also created the sound-and-video piece Glaciers of Consciousness, which was presented at the FA3 Festival in Montreal last year and which is "about the opaque nature of reality, as expounded through sensual logic: specifically, the epistemological intensities of one incompatible world cracking through another.")She is also a filmmaker who is currently editing a documentary titled Mountaintop Removal about
her native region of West Virginia, funded by the
Maryland State Arts Council.