SubZero 2014, the blockbuster summer celebration of San Jose culture, is expanding to two days this year, June 6 and 7. And “San Jose culture” is really the only phrase broad enough to describe the scene, as every year SubZero brings together the disparate strands of South Bay art, music, food, crafts, merch, tech and just plain odd to one big party on South First.

As one can see in our gallery at the bottom of the page, last year’s festival-goers got their fill of zombies, body paint, hula-hooping acrobats, GameBoy music wizardry and gorillas playing tiny toy xylophones. I, for one, bought a small painting of a paramecium in a business suit and spent a lot of time trying to avoid the nightmare turtle-bed sheet performance art people outside Zero1 Garage. This is a usual SubZero.

Organized by Brian Eder and Cherri Lakey of Anno Domini Gallery, the festival is entering it’s seventh year by expanding to two days and packing them with all sorts of this kind of weird and wonderful stuff. When contacted for this article, Brian said that he and Cherri do too much of the talking and instead put me directly in touch with some of the artists and vendors in this year’s festival. The list of options they sent ran way too long to tackle comprehensively, but I got in touch with a few of this year’s participants to give an idea of the range of people participating in the festival.

One San Jose artist, Andy Wallace, is moving off the wall and into the realm of illusion for SubZero. His installation is going to be 120 square feet of wooden lattice, lights, shadows and one-way mirrors designed to create a space full of optical illusion. “It’ll be very fun house-like” he said. “People can really interact with it.” He’ll be spending the first day of the festival assembly all the pieces, and the second day is just for people to enjoy it. “I’ve never really done anything so environmental. Everything I’ve done so far has been gallery style.”

Then there’s Thoey Ngo, whose pop-up shop EcoMonster specializes in green crafts for kids, plus hands-on workshops and DIY kits. She’s putting on one of succulent terrarium workshops–for kids and adults–at her booth this year and will also have some of her eco-conscious merch on hand too. Ngo describes EcoMonster as “one of my full-time jobs,” which started out as a hobby on Etsy, but soon became something more serious. Now she’s doing pop-up shops and workshops around the South Bay. Folks interested in the workshop at SubZero need to preregister over at EcoMonster.com.

While there will be strong representation from San Jose’s music scene, SubZero attracts bands from out-of-town too. LA-based Herbert Bail Orchestra heard about the festival from local psychadelic-folk rock duo Brother Grand, and decided to put SubZero on their spring California tour. The indie folk band is a shifting line-up of anywhere from two to ten people, with accordians, banjos, all sorts of horns, you name it.

The Herbert Bail Orchestra started out with just Fratollilo and his longtime friend Andrew Katz, who put the “orchestra” part in their name as a joke. Now, it fits. “We used to play shows where it was just me and Andy,” Fratollilo told me. “Now it’s like we found a bassist and a drummer, a keyboardist, another singer, lost our drummer, found a trumpet and another multi-instrumentalist… I could go on and on.” Fratollilo emphasized multiple times that he could only speak for himself, but he’s excited for SubZero and excited for the band’s third album, slated for 2015. “I wanna write 100 songs, and pick out the 12 best. We’re going to play a couple new ones at Subzero for sure.”

These are only a few of the huge list of artists, vendors and performers which is available in full here.

Plus, check out some photos from last year’s SubZero by Geoffrey Smith II, via Metroactive.com: