Anyone looking for a rich diversity of entertainment that sits slightly outside the mainstream need look no further than Oxford Contemporary Music’s forthcoming programme, which covers just about as eclectic a selection of music as you could hope to find.

“What we try to do is introduce people to things, and bring music to Oxford that perhaps can be extended to a wider audience,” director Jo Ross explains.

“If we work with very established artists, we tend not to just book them in another tour that they’re doing, but work with them ourselves to produce projects that are different and unique, or they’ll come to us with an idea for a project that they’re working on that’s slightly different from anything they’ve done before.”

One exciting innovation this year is a mini-festival for street bands, which will feature local street band Horns of Plenty, and has also attracted bands from as far away as Cumbria and Edinburgh. Jo was inspired to put on the festival after attending the HONK! Festival in America.

“It’s just outside Boston, near Harvard, and lots of bands from all over America descend on this little town and completely take it over for a time,” she says. “So in a modest way we’re trying to kick off something a bit like that. There’s a lot of potential for that kind of outdoor musical activity, especially leading up to 2012, so it’s a chance to galvanise everyone towards a particular aim. But also we wanted to hear about other bands’ experiences, share ideas and maybe share some music.”

The mini-festival will include workshops and performances, and Jo promises that on at least a couple of occasions they will “descend on the town and make a lot of noise!” So if you happen to be in Bonn Square on Saturday, May 8, you will catch the bands in action, delivering a wide range of music, from the jazz sounds of New Orleans to traditional English music, with some Yugoslavian music thrown in for good measure.

Later in the season, you can catch the innovative, Bristol-based folk band Spiro, whose album Lightbox was released last year on Peter Gabriel’s RealWorld label, to great acclaim. This is folk with a difference – it’s all instrumental, and is rooted in traditional English folk tunes but with contemporary influences.

“It’s quite hard to define,” admits Alex Vann, who co-founded the band 17 years ago. “We use folk instruments, but it’s also influenced by electronic dance music and modern classical.

“So we use traditional melodies but then we compose around them to build up big pieces that are often quite dense, with a lot going on.

“We don’t want people thinking it’s just traditional music mixed with dance music – we hope it’s much subtler than that.

“We play our instruments in a certain way, which differentiates us from a lot of other bands, particularly bands using folk instruments. We don’t use any ornamentation in our playing, so the violin uses no vibrato, for instance. I think that gives us our sound, really.”

The season ends with something totally unique – the premiere of an unaccompanied, polyphonic choral work, Allele, by Michael Zev Gordon, in which the 40 members of the New London Chamber Choir will be singing parts based on their own genes.

The piece comes from a Wellcome Trust-funded study, in which London-based anaesthetist Andrew Morley has been comparing the genes of 250 choral singers with those of 250 non-choral singers, to see if there is a specific gene that determines whether people are musically gifted or not.

“It’s been great fun, and people have been very warm, interested, enthusiastic and helpful,” says Andrew.

“I’m very much hoping to have some preliminary results from my study to announce at the premiere, which will be nice.”

The piece will be performed alongside other choral pieces around the theme of light, in the highly unusual venue of the Diamond Light Source at Harwell, and includes a tour of the synchrotron for those interested.

Elsewhere in the season there’s Danish pop band Efterklang, guitarist Del Casher and the Lotus Pedals, May Morning celebrations and a disco for the under 7s.

“It’s nice to pick up on the things that we feel are particularly exciting or innovative,” says Jo.

“That’s what OCM is all about.”