Hans Tammen on Live Constructions: Sunday, June 15th at 10PM

Tune in to Sunday's Live Constructions for an interview with electronic artist Hans Tammen. Tammen has been very active in the experimental electronic scene, through his involvement in Harvestworks and his Third Eye Orchestra. Tammen is now presenting the Dark Circuits Festival (June 14-23), which features several nights of performance using innovative electronic instruments. We sat down for about an hour to talk about his history in the experimental electronic music scene as well as what we can expect to hear at the festival. Listen!

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 “Endangered Guitar” and 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 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.” His 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. Hans Tammen 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 the music. 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.

From June 14 through 23, 2014, Hans Tammen’s DARK CIRCUITS FESTIVAL features performers who work in contemporary electronic music practices such as circuit bending, no-input mixers, laptops, turntablism, analogue circuitry, network sniffers, live coding and soldering, plus other instruments we may have never heard of yet. http://www.darkcircuitsfestival.com