- For the similarly-named author, see John Berendt.
John Berndt (b. 1967) is a musician and organizer based in Baltimore, Maryland who is best known as an extended-technique experimental saxophonist and electronic musician. As an enfant terrible, he participated in the nascent neoism cultural movement along with Monty Cantsin, Istvan Kantor, tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE, and Blaster Al Ackerman, an 80s cultural movement which aligned itself with subversion and self-reference, but also practically involved mail art, tape trading, noise music, and post-Fluxus happenings in North America and Europe. Subsequently becoming a respected businessman and grafting those skills onto his avant-garde roots, Berndt, one member of a collective of artists and improvising musicians in the spirit of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, works on the Red Room experimental performance series, which has presented weekly events since the early 1996, and the High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music, a large annual improvised music festival begun in 1999 in Baltimore where all performers play in new groups. He also runs the Recorded record label which has issued several discs by Berndt's sometime collaborator Henry Flynt.
