Local band Black Eyelid will perform improv music and offer an experimental music workshop at 7 p.m. Saturday in Bob’s Bookstore at 601 Monroe Ave.

“The Unsound Workshop” will be the first for Black Eyelid, the two-man band of Bruce Goble and Mike Schutz, who have been experimenting with sound for five years.

“We have set up on the street corners before,” Goble said. “We got some money in Champaign, but I think that was for us to leave.”

Joe Judd, the owner of Bob’s Bookstore, said he is equally unsure of what the turnout for the event will be. He said he anticipates between eight and 35 people showing up.

“I’d be happy if 10 people showed up,” Schutz said. “If nobody shows up, we’ll still do something, because we just have fun doing it.”

Their instruments range from the traditional to the unconventional.

Among these instruments will be a snare drum, a rolling piano, a trombone and an old coronet, alongside a digital saxophone from the 1980s, a Halloween bucket tied to a stick with string, the “Thundertube,” and a bass made out of a toilet seat.

“A lot of times we’ll just use whatever’s around,” Schutz said. “We’ll play on tire rims, old tubes, exhaust pipes.”

The music will be followed by an opportunity for audience members to perform.

One of Black Eyelid’s greatest influences is the late John Cage, an American composer, who used equally unconventional means of making music, including putting bits of paper in amongst the strings of a piano.

Goble and Schutz met five years ago after Goble put an article on Craigslist asking for a fellow “sound artist” to improvise with.

Black Eyelid coined their name off a random band generator on the Internet, resulting in a band name as well as first album and song. Song names for their first album include “Chill Pit,” “Persistent Stagecoach.”

Judd said he hopes events similar to “The Unsound Workshop” will become a regularity in the future.

“It’s hard to describe, but pretty cool,” Judd said.

Mallory Kutnik can be reached at 581-2812 or mbkutnick@eiu.edu