The Musicians performing were a mix of member of Buffalo State’s Digital Music Ensemble Eighth Nerve, and Local Sound Artists from Squeaky Wheel.

Performers:
Jim Abramson
Kyle Butler
Jax Deluca
Anthony Henry
Pat Krebs
Matt Lester
Matt Schroeder
John Smigielski
Scott Valkwitch
Hans Tammen- Composer/Director Third Eye Laptop Orchestra

Under the name RISK MANAGEMENT, the music of Bruce Gremo and Hans Tammen is structured around playing techniques and instrument schemes which are by nature and by design precarious. Bruce Gremo is performing on the Cilia, his patented flute-controller instrument, originally developed in part through a grant from Harvestworks a decade ago. Hans Tammen plays an analog modular synthesizer built around chaotic behaviors.

[Apr 22] Risk Management: Bruce Gremo & Hans Tammen

Bruce Gremo – Cilia
Hans Tammen – analog modular synthesizer

Monday, April 22, 2013, 7pm
Admission: FREE

Location:
Harvestworks – www.harvestworks.org
596 Broadway, #602 | New York, NY 10012 | Phone: 212-431-1130
Subway: F/M/D/B Broadway/Lafayette, R Prince, 6 Bleeker

Under the name RISK MANAGEMENT, the music of Bruce Gremo and Hans Tammen is structured around playing techniques and instrument schemes which are by nature and by design precarious. They are musical tight rope walkers, endeavoring to maintain a balance between control, while at the same time, unleashing forces that threaten to overwhelm them. The music abounds in paradox; some of the greatest intensities are achieved playing softly and sparsely, some of the mellowest moments with loud and sustained sonority. This musical emotion ranges from the serene and contemplative to the agitated and agonized, and it tends to move slowly through these differences.

Bruce Gremo

Since the late 1990, Beijing based composer and multiple flutist Bruce Gremo Since has focused on computer application composition. This includes pitch-tracking intensive applications, and the Cilia, his patented flute-controller instrument, originally developed in part through a grant from Harvestworks a decade ago.

Bruce Gremo also regularly performs on bass flute, alto shakulute, Japanese shakuhachi, glissando head joint flute, Indian bansuri, and Chinese xun. He is also principle flutist in the Peking Sinfonietta, and a classical recitalist. Gremo is interested in developing concert formats where different performance practices meet; classical repertoire and improvisation, hi-tech electronic and acoustic, western and eastern, old and new, functional and ecstatic. These interests are born out of the mix of his graduate academic composition education and his practical education as a participant in the free improvisation and experimental music scene in New York from the late 1980s, until he relocated to Beijing in 2006.

He has been a soloist at; Lincoln Center Festival, Wien Modern, the BBC Proms Festival at the Royal Albert Hall, the Knitting Factory Jazz Festival under Ornette Coleman’s direction. He toured over fourteen months as synthesizer programmer and soloist with the Peter Sellars production of the KunQu opera, The Peony Pavilion. Recipient of numerous awards, his music has been performed around the world.

http://suddensite.net

Cilia

The Cilia is a flute controller, conceived and currently developing with two objectives; first, to enable live solo electronic performance with ‘orchestral’ resources, and second, to explore the possibilities of virtuosic controller performance. It has been the promise of electronic music since its beginnings that it can do sonically what acoustic instruments cannot. The Cilia endeavors to meet this promise with respect to live human performance. To surpass the nuance and complexity of a fine acoustic instrument; this is a condition for virtuosic controller performance practice. The Cilia design process aspires to facilitate extraordinary athletic and empathic musical feats.

​The hardware controller consists of a flute mouthpiece that splits an air column, as does any flute. Instead of keys or finger holes, five 3-dimensional track pads are used. The performance gestures are modeled on that of the Japanese Shakuhachi. The controller data routing design is the most complex part of the instrument. Preliminary data manipulation happens on a PIC microcontroller. The data is received and managed in a Max application. Sound generating implementations include FM, additive synthesis, waveform synthesis, granular synthesis, dynamic delay and reverb, sound file manipulation, midi libraries and spectral cross synthesis.

​The Cilia originally developed with the assistance of Harvestworks AIR program a decade ago. This performance will provide an update on its progress.

See a YouTube demonstration of the Cilia here!

​Hans Tammen

​​Hans Tammen creates sounds that have been described as an alien world of bizarre textures and a journey through the land of unending sonic operations. He produces rapid-fire juxtapositions of radically contrastive and fascinating noises, with micropolyphonic timbres and textures, aggressive sonic eruptions, but also quiet pulses and barely audible sounds. Signal To Noise called his guitar works “…a killer tour de force of post-everything guitar damage”, All Music Guide recommended him: “…clearly one of the best experimental guitarists to come forward during the 1990s.”

​​He currently plays an analog modular synthesizer built around chaotic behaviors, where small changes in the settings may yield widely diverging sonic and rhythmic changes, forcing the player to constantly rethink and rearrange music.
​
Hans Tammen’s numerous projects include site-specific performances and collaborative efforts with dance, light, video, and theatre, utilizing technology from planetarium projectors to guitar robots and disklavier pianos. He received a Fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) in the category Digital/Electronic Arts in 2009 for the ”Endangered Guitar” – a hybrid guitar/software instrument used to control interactive live sound processing.

His THIRD EYE ORCHESTRA open form compositions for large ensembles and live sound processing, or laptop/electronic ensembles, are inspired by Earle Brown’s Available Forms, and based on numerous scored “building blocks” that are constantly rearranged when performed.

His works have been presented on festivals in the US, Canada, Mexico, Russia, India, South Africa and all over Europe. He recorded on labels such as Innova, ESP-DISK, Nur/Nicht/Nur, Creative Sources, Leo Records, Potlatch, Cadence, and Hybrid.

Hans Tammen received grants and composer commissions from MAPFund, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, American Music Center, Chamber Music America, New York State Council On The Arts (NYSCA), New York Foundation For The Arts (NYFA), American Composers Forum w/ Jerome Foundation, New York State Music Fund, Goethe Institute w/ Foreign Affairs Office, among others.

http://www.tammen.org

Show Details

• Artist: Risk Management w/ Bruce Gremo
• Date: Monday, April 22nd 2013
• Time: 7:00pm
• City: Risk Management w/ Bruce Gremo in New York
• Venue: Harvestworks
• Address: 596 Broadway, #602
• Venue phone: 212-431-1130
• Country: United States
• Age restrictions: All Ages
• Notes: Bruce Gremo – Cilia, Hans Tammen – analog modular synthesizer
• Add to Google Calendar | Download iCal

Denman Maroney – hyperpiano
Hans Tammen – hyperpiano live sound processing

Denman Maroney and Hans Tammen have been regularly working together since 1998, as a duo and in other formations. In 1999, they released their first duo CD “Billabong” on the French label Potlatch. This year, they celebrate their collaboration with a new release on OutNow Recordings, “Arson”, to be premiered in concert at this year’s New York Electronic Arts Festival. In this work, Denman Maroney’s dizzying and diverse palette of piano sounds is electronically captured by Hans Tammen, and processed into radically contrastive and fascinating noises emanating from Tammen’s interactive software.

Location: Church For All Nations
417 West 57th Street (Between 9th and 10th avenues), New York, NY
Subway: Columbus Circle station (A, C, B, D, 1, and 9), 57th Street station (N/R/B and Q), 7th Avenue station (B, D, and E)

This event at Church For All Nations will also feature other artists: Meridian7 (aka Lori Napoleon) will perform an analog audio excursion that brings original telephone equipment back to life; Peter Edwards uses sound and the light to reveal different layers of complex electrical systems which are then manipulated by hand to create audio visual patterns; and Phillip Stearns is exploring the physiological dimensions of electronic media reduced to their elementary components: light and sound.

This event is part of Harvestworks’ 2013 New York Electronic Art Festival, in partnership with Church For All Nations and Hells Kitchen Cultural Center.

Admission: $15 – For tickets contact: dwhook@att.net

For more information about the festival see http://www.harvestworks.org/jun-5-meridian7-peter-edwards-denman-maroney-hans-tammen-phillip-stearns/

Denman Maroney Photo by Peter Gannushkin

Denman Maroney

“There are few minds as agile and inquiring as that of pianist, composer and educator Denman Maroney. Over nearly 40 years, he has managed to rethink the piano’s vocabulary, creating a readily identifiable language on the instrument. He calls his contribution ‘hyperpiano,’ a method of playing inside the piano that is characterized by a dizzying and diverse pallet of sonorities that make the instrument into an orchestra. He has also developed an equally unique compositional language involving combined pulses, employing the phrase ‘temporal harmony’ to describe it. Yet, there is a directness, at times almost a simplicity, in his music. With his playing and in his compositions, Maroney combines musical genres and transforms sounds we think we understand, adding depth and color, often at great speed, while never sacrificing clarity.” Mark Medwin, All About Jazz. http://www.denmanmaroney.com

Hans Tammen

Hans Tammen creates sounds that have been described as an alien world of bizarre textures and a journey through the land of unending sonic operations. He produces rapid-fire juxtapositions of radically contrastive and fascinating noises, with micropolyphonic timbres and textures, aggressive sonic eruptions, but also quiet pulses and barely audible sounds – through means of his interactive software programming, by working with the room itself, and, as a critic observed, with his “…fingers stuck in a high voltage outlet”. Signal To Noise called his Endangered Guitar works “…a killer tour de force of post-everything guitar damage”, AllAboutJazz called the music of his Third Eye Orchestra “nothing short of breathtaking”, and “a masterpiece of musical evocation”. http://tammen.org

Show Details

• Artist: w/ Denman Maroney
• Date: Wednesday, June 5th 2013
• Time: 7:00pm
• City: w/ Denman Maroney in New York, NY
• Venue: New York Electronic Art Festival / Church For All Nations
• Address: 417 West 57th Street
• Venue phone: (212) 333-5583
• Country: United States
• Age restrictions: All Ages
• Add to Google Calendar | Download iCal

Since 2007 the festival is held in Saint-Petersburg (Russia) on the basis of Media Art Laboratory CYLAND.

The festival’s partners include the leading art institutions and museums, such as the Hermitage Youth Education Center, Saint-Petersburg State University, the Association of Contemporary Art Galleries, Creative Space TKACHI and others.

CYBERFEST program includes:

— an exhibition (of media objects and media installations);
— live performances;
— sound and video art programs;
— an educational program (with lectures, workshops, master classes);
— an Internet conference;
— a concert.

Each year the festival gathers more than 80 artists and art professionals from more than 20 countries. CYBERFEST’s map covers the globe from the U.S. to the Philippines, from Germany to Japan, from Canada to Brazil, from Finland to Italy.

CYBERFEST is a democratic festival, where newcomers participate on a par with the stars from media art world.

The festival aims to develop the Russian media art scene by creating a network of professional contacts around the world and engaging new participants in it.

This compilation is an excerpt from sound-art program curated by Sergey Komarov.

credits

Infernal Machines w/ Lars Graugaard at Firehouse Festival

Art Installations by John Wells, Douglas Culhane, Ken Butler, Jennifer Moses

Video  by Don Slepian and Stuart Diamond, Douglas Urbank

Selections from Obama: At The Table,  Theater Group Dzieci

Lot of Music by – Levy Lorenzo: Electronics, Darly Shawn: Guitar, Curtis Hasselbring: Trombone,  Matthew Henning: Audio,  Jonathan Elliot: Bass and Electronics, Sandra Sprecher: Audio, Lars Graugaard: Electronics, Hans Tammen: Electronics, Eve Beglarian: Audio, Mary Rowell: Violin

Lars Graugaard

SPECIAL GUEST:  Emily Danger  - a dark cabaret rock band with Emily Nicholas (vocals, piano, guitar, lyrics), Ryan Nearhoff (vocals, guitar, percussion), Cameron Orr (violin, piano, melodica, vocals), and Coyote Anderson (bass, guitar).

Plus Li’l Miss Dolemite: DJ

Free Snacks, Beer by The Brooklyn Brewery

Doors open at 6, Music starts at 7

$10 cover  online Brown Paper Tickets  http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/357779,

$15 or 2 for $25 at the door.

Show Details

• Artist: Infernal Machines: Lars Graugaard + Hans Tammen
• Date: Saturday, April 27th 2013
• Time: 7:00pm
• City: Infernal Machines: Lars Graugaard + Hans Tammen in Brooklyn, NY
• Venue: The Firehouse
• Address: 246 Frost St.
• Country: United States
• Age restrictions: All Ages
• Add to Google Calendar | Download iCal

At Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona / Photo Credit: Pere Platdesaba

Fine Kwiatkowski explores all the possibilities of her body’s twisting, spinning and turning, while Hans Tammen creates sounds that have been described as an alien world of bizarre textures and a journey through the land of unending sonic operations.

Fine Kwiatkowski and Hans Tammen have been performing together since the mid-90s. They first started out working together on large improvisational projects before increasingly devoting themselves to working as a duo. Striking at first, the contrast between machines and the human body shrinks down as the combined artistry of the duo takes hold. Their work is not about reacting to one’s sounds or the other’s movements, but to set in motion two parallel narratives, occasionally intersecting yet always accompanying one another. Due to their remarkable creativity, this is the intricate exchange of two artistic genres dialoguing equally in a rich relation of tensions. The duo performed extensively in Europe, as well as at Victoriaville and Sound Symposium Festivals in Canada.

Saturday, January 18, 2014, 7:30pm

http://www.fine-k.de — http://www.tammen.org – http://www.zweitagezeit.ch

Excerpts from Sound Symposium Festival, St. John’s, Canada

Preview and purchase EP on iTunes here.

See the original Clang website here: http://clang.cl/infernal-machines/

Infernal Machines

The endangered guitar is Hans Tammens’ guitar-add-computer hybrid, and a vehicle for unending sonic explorations. Together with Lars Graugaard’s sophisticated interactive computer sounds, patterns and grooves they become Infernal Machines, and a world of rhythms and sonic escapes opens up. Their debut Infernal Machines (digital, clang001) is music with tight electronic punches, dizzying chases and unreal, compelling atmospheres.

Importantly, the word “infernal” must be read into the many conceptual layers important to the album. This is not hellish music, but music of a place in space where sonic pleasures are strong, intense and dangerous, but also mesmerizing and at times irresistible. The digital, non-human sounds and melodic gestures are counter-balanced by construed, yet strangely natural, rhythm patterns where beats drift in and out of time, mutate and wash away, only to be reeled back in, dressed up for more adventures. This gives the album a warm and structured feel, like analogue patina on what is not really such a hard and impenetrable surface.

Typically, each track sets of with a basic material that is slowly explored in all its facets. This include gestures, textures and patterns, and often the track may move change character quite a lot as it goes. The balance struck between the continuous evolution and the actions at the spur of the moment is what makes this album stand out. The opener Messenger Boy lingers in its ambient atmosphere, before slowly drifting into a tribal beat where unreal ‘vocal’ sounds convey a seemingly crucial message in some unknown language. In this way each track simultaneously delineate and fulfills its intentions.

Tracklist
1. Messenger Boy (6:06)
2. What If (10:01)
3. Infernal Machines (9:48)
4. Coils and Spirals (7:06)
total time: 28:01

Recorded, edited and mixed November 8, 10 and 12 2012 in the James L. Dolan Music Recording Studio, New York University Steinhardt, Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions
Recording engineer Paul Geluso
Engineering assistants Tyler Sawyer, Brian Bourque, Amar Lal and Peter M. MacDuffie
Produced by Lars Graugaard and Paul Geluso
Mastered by Lars Graugaard
Cover art Kyoshino/iStockphoto

HANS TAMMEN & THIRD EYE ORCHESTRA: PIKAIA

Saturday, May 18th, 5pm
QUEENS NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL
http://queensnewmusicfestival.org
http://www.secrettheatre.com
The Secret Theatre
4402 23rd St Long Island City, NY 11101
(718) 392-0722

HANS TAMMEN & THIRD EYE ORCHESTRA: PIKAIA
Hans Tammen uses Earle Brown’s open form composition idea as a starting point to create a large multimovement piece for string and wind quartets, keyboards, rhythm section, voice and live sound processing. The composer has gathered a dream-team of some of the most virtuosic instrumentalists to ever elude labels or boundaries for the premiere of his new work PIKAIA, which combines composed material with extemporization to create a score whose modus operandi is constant change on every level. All About Jazz called the music “nothing short of breathtaking”, and “a masterpiece of musical evocation”.

PERFORMERS:
David Soldier (vio), Jason Hwang (vio), Stephanie Griffin (vla), Alex Waterman (cello), Ned Rothenberg (clarinet, bass clarinet), Michael Lytle (clarinet, contra bass clarinet), Briggan Krauss (as, baritone sax), Chris McIntyre (trombone). Dafna Naphtali (live sound processing, voice), Denman Maroney (p/ kb), Ursel Schlicht (p/kb), Andrea Parkins (accordion), Jonas Tauber (b), Andrew Drury (perc), Hans Tammen (composition, conducting, concept)

See the festival press release with more information here!

Video by Don Mount