Expect the unexpected from Chimera Quartet

When the aptly named Chimera Quartet performs, the music is always different and difficult to describe. It will bring its experimental improvisations to the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon on Sunday (Sept. 7).

"Almost anything can happen when we play," says guitarist Timothy Hill. "We're not going to break into a pop song, but we go in a lot of divergent directions."

During a gig last year at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, violinist Iva Bittová tapped the instrument's backside for percussive purposes. At times, she flitted about the stage like a butterfly and scatted or sang bird-like calls.

"With her, you can expect the unexpected," says Hill.

Bamboo flute player Steve Gorn imitated avian chirps on a small wind instrument and joined Bittová on her otherworldly vocal wanderings. At one point, Hill and bass player Michael Bisio traded licks, with the guitar taking an atonal tack over an anchoring bass pattern. Bisio also bent low to pluck the strings underneath the bridge.

Gorn and Hill are steeped in eastern music and philosophy, which contributes a trance-like underpinning. Chimera's calmer, more mystical tones and drones could serve as the soundtrack for a meditation session.

Dynamics veer from slow and heady to bursting fireworks. At one point in the Omega show, the bass and violin erupted into screechy, scratchy interplay. Bisio abused his bow as strands of loose horsehair flapped around.

"We're all interested in the relationship between sound and silence," says Hill. "We also want to convey something through the music that brings people to a more peaceful, contemplative place."

Bittová often returns to the Czech Republic, where she is well-known as a musician, and brings a Moravian folk music influence to the mix. The group toured her native country earlier this year.

"During some of the more frenetic moments, she's quite good at bursting the balloon the rest of us are blowing up and getting us back on a track," says Hill.

Though classically trained, Bisio is primarily a jazz cat who teaches at Bennington College and holds down something of a center during Chimera's more avant-garde moments. He is also the low-end specialist with the Matthew Shipp Trio, known for improvisational twists and turns.

Gorn, a 2011 Grammy Award winner for Best New Age Album, Miho: Journey to the Mountain, has played with Paul Winter and Paul Simon and brings other instruments to Chimera gigs, including a clarinet and a soprano saxophone. Where the music meanders will determine if he pulls them out of his stand.

Like his bandmates, Hill dips his fingers into many musical pies, including singer-songwriter gigs, playing piano in a jazz duo, picking with a bossa nova group and performing with another musician fond of alternate tunings and non-Western microtones played on guitar, harp, lyre and zither.

With Chimera, he says, "we're all faithfully relating to the music each of us loves and has spent all our lives learning and playing. But we're trying to leave the past at the door and create something new as we pull out all the instruments' possibilities."

The Howland Cultural Center is located at 477 Main St. in Beacon. Tickets for the performance, which begins at 6 p.m., are $20 at dub.sh/howland-chimera or $25 at the door.