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For 20 minutes prior to his set Friday night, German experimental musician Odal rearranges the mass of wires, pedals, sound mixers, effects boxes and cassette players that will somehow create his strange brand of electronic music. His fingers work quickly, pressing buttons, tossing around wires and adjusting sound levels like a mad scientist.

Hunched over a midsized table, every inch of which is covered by his "instruments," he occasionally rolls his eyes or sighs in frustration if his equipment doesn't yield the precise sound he needs.

It's no easy task to ensure his set of blips, ominous tones and the occasional 10-second block of feedback will go off without a hitch, but eventually Odal is ready to perform.

"Two more minutes," Odal, whose real name is Peter Zincken, tells the crowd around 11:30 p.m. He then disappears into a supply room at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Silver Spring, which by day is an art gallery.

Right on schedule, Zincken, a short man with a ponytail, a mustache and a potbelly, walks out of the supply room. He is naked except for black electrical tape and a hockey mask similar to those worn by Jason Voorhees in the horror films "Friday the 13th." Like the many electronic gadgets he uses during his set, the tape is strategically placed. It covers his chest, backside and groin area, but during the course of the high-energy set, his attempts at covering up fail him, to the delight of some in the crowd and to the shock of others.

This is experimental music.

While Zincken was by far the most bizarre of the five acts that played Friday as part of the Ninth Annual Washington, D.C., Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music, he was symbolic of the festival's tagline: "A celebration of audio extremes."

For the first year, Pyramid Atlantic was part of that celebration, which ran from Sept. 22 to Sept. 27. The Silver Spring art space joined festival venues like music clubs the Black Cat and Velvet Lounge along with venues of higher prestige like the John. F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts and the Embassy of Switzerland.

Holding monthly events with Sonic Circuits, a D.C.-based nonprofit concert promoter, Pyramid Atlantic has positioned itself as a top provider of all things weird and avant-garde in the metropolitan area music scene. It's also among the few places besides restaurants to go for live music in a pre-Fillmore downtown Silver Spring.

"It's part of giving people choices," said Jose Dominguez, executive director of Pyramid Atlantic, which is located at 8230 Georgia Ave. and has hosted Sonic Circuits events since July 2008. "Hopefully when the Fillmore comes people can say, ‘I'll go to the Fillmore and hear this and then I can go to Pyramid Atlantic and see something different.'"

That experimental music has found a home in Silver Spring, a diverse town that is also designated an Arts and Entertainment District by the state, isn't surprising, Dominguez said.

"We can be experimental, we can be cutting-edge," he said.

At least 75 people crammed into Pyramid Atlantic Friday, sitting on office chairs and ottomans after the dozens of folding chairs in the gallery quickly filled. They toted Pabst Blue Ribbon and Red Hook beers sold from coolers. Only a string of white Christmas lights on the floor separated the front row of seats from the performers.

Experimental music promises none of the customs of a traditional rock show. There's no banter between performer and crowd, and the audience is expected to remain dead silent while the acts are playing.

There aren't any catcalls, hooting or hollering. Many onlookers simply swayed to the music with their eyes closed, keeping any response to the music internal.

"I get my mind blown routinely at Pyramid Atlantic," said Andrew McCarry of Fairfax, Va. "There's no fluff, there's no handholding, it's the pure expression of ecstatic humanity."

If Zincken lies at one extreme end of the experimental music spectrum, the more conventional and certainly more-clothed acts that played Friday night fall somewhere in the middle.

The Evan Parker and Ned Rothenberg Duo is a pair of middle-aged jazz musicians with significant technical skill in a variety of brass instruments. Janel and Anthony are a cellist and guitarist, respectively, mixing slick instrumentation with a variety of effects pedals. But also occasionally banging a children's piano against the guitar strings to produce a droning sound accompanied by plinking keys.

"Some people bring more skill to it than others," said Jeff Bagato, the founder of Electric Possible, another D.C.-area experimental music promoter. "… You could be cynical and say a 5-year-old could do it… but it takes very close listening and improvisational skills."

Chapel Hill, N.C., duo Bicameral Mind utilized several unidentifiable instruments, some converted from junk around their homes. Like a magician performing a trick, Bryce Eiman of Bicameral Mind conjured strange sounds from a small electronic effects processor called a Kaoss Pad, simply by waving his hand above it menacingly.

"It's just easier to think of it as a new type of jazz," Eiman joked when asked how he would describe Bicameral Mind's music.

And then there's Zincken. He was originally scheduled to play a Wednesday night show at the Velvet Lounge in Washington, D.C., but customs officials were suspicious of his equipment, Sonic Circuits Director Jeff Surak said.

His music was as bizarre as his outfit and his back story, eschewing the occasional melodies of Janel and Anthony or the soothing drones of another of Friday's acts, David Daniell, for an uneven collection of blips, tape recordings of muffled screams, extended bouts of intentional feedback and heavy breathing filtered through a microphone.

As Surak puts it, "experimental music comes in many shapes or forms."

"When [listeners] are first exposed to it, there are different kinds of reactions," Surak said. "Some are really fascinated by it, … and other people are like, "What the hell is this?" and walk out spewing profanity."

Its inclusive nature is experimental music's main draw, its fans say. It is a genre defined by not just sonic qualities, but the ability to travel 4,000 miles, wear underwear made of electrical tape and feel right at home.

"There's not tight jeans, chit-chat or bar talk," McCarry said. "It's people that are truly interested in expanding their minds and what they want to hear."