Plays amplified palette in a freely improvising quartet with Fred Lonberg-Holm, Michael Zerang, and Lou Mallozzi.
Plays percussion and amplified objects in the November Quartet with Chris Burns, Thomas Gaudynski, and Steve Nelson-Raney.
Plays invented instruments, amplified objects, and live electronics in the trio Audiotrope with Steve Nelson-Raney and Thomas Gaudynski.
Plays amplified palette in The LOST DATA Project with Jon Mueller and Jim Schoenecker.
Plays amplified objects, prepared sounds, and live electronics in the duo Whole or by the Slice with Lou Mallozzi.
Host: Alternating Currents every Sunday night on WMSE-FM in Milwaukee (91.7FM) from 6 until 9 p.m.
Curator: Alternating Currents Live at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, a spring and fall performance series of new and experimental music from the midwest and beyond.
Author: Aero Through the Ages, a retrospective look at cartoons and comic strips by Hal Rammel, 1979-2009. (Chicago: Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2009).
Author: Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias (University of Illinois Press, 1990), an historical and cultural survey of the meaning of Diddie Wa Diddie, Schlaraffenland, Cockaigne, the Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Nowhere across the American landscape.
Influences
“I have always been haunted by the feeling that the painter has much to gain from making use of forces that tend to work against his action.”
- Jean Dubuffet
“busco sin encontrar, busco un instante . . ."
- Octavio Paz, Sunstone, 1957
"It starts as a noise that sets off another noise in the dark pit of things"
- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Sounds Like
“Water flows in a running brook like a comb combing its own teeth. Microscopic analysis of running water shows a superimposition of ‘combs,’ layer after layer trying to rake its own filaments out straight. Flowing is water’s way of resuming its main purpose while rugged banks and uneven riverbeds interrupt its coursing and disturb the smoothness of its motion. Flowing is water’s way of assigning its power to units and marshaling its forces. Any gush of water is a harnessed volcano: the highest form of maintenance. The next time you decide to set your ideas in order, follow some trickling stream along.”
Hal Rammel designs and builds musical instruments in the service of composition and free improvisation. He is the inventor of the triolin, bibliolin, snath, aerolin, and hydro-aerolin and has performed and recorded on these instruments in ensembles with John Corbett, Matt Turner, Michael Zerang, Steve Nelson-Raney, Jim Baker, Tom Hamilton, Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith, Terri Kapsalis, among many others. His electroacoustic instruments include the amplified palette and single-string electric guitar and he has performed and recorded these instruments with the Nihilist Spasm Band, Jon Mueller, Chris Rosenau, Matt Turner, Fred Lonberg-Holm's Lightbox Orchestra, Steve Nelson-Raney, Thomas Gaudynski and others.
Hal Rammel has recorded for Penumbra Music, Crouton Records, Necessary Arts, Soutrane, and Atavistic Records. His studio-based electroacoustic assemblages constructed from location recordings and found sounds have been featured in the Chicago's Outer Ear Festival of Sound and have been released on Penumbra Music (the duo CD with Lou Mallozzi titled Whole or By The Slice), Atavistic Records (Weave and Raze on the 2006 compilation Eye & Ear) and on Penumbra Music's collection of radiophonic works Three Days.
Hal Rammel's most recent recordings include compositions for amplified palette - Like Water Tightly Wound - on a limited edition 10" vinyl recording from Crouton Records and Three Days - on Penumbra Music - a collection of three radiophonic works inlcuding the previously unreleased electroacoustic compositions "Pitchforth" and "All or Nothing."
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Hal Rammel (amplified palette), Jon Mueller (percussion), and Jim Schoenecker (electronics) performing for Local/Live on WMSE-FM in Milwaukee, January 2009.
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“Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, and pleased with merely numerically adding up my stores. Other times I have joys, when unexpectedly coming upon an outrageous story that may not be altogether a lie, or upon a macabre little thing that may make some reviewer of my more or less good works mad. But always there is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note; and it is this faraway, haunting, or often taunting, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me piling on -”
- Charles Fort, 1932
In this performance, filmed at Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee on
January 15, 2000, Hal Rammel plays musical saw in Yehuda Yannay’s multi-media composition Radiant Inner Light, based on a Kabbalistic work from the 17th Century. Composer Yehuda Yannay can be heard reciting a mantra of meditations based all possible combinations of two letters of this ancient text.
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Thanks Hal, it is an honour to be added here, hearing your self insprirated instruments - sometimes it seems like very electronically. Real experimental music! Compliments from Hamburg Udo
Hi Hal, I more than enjoyed being part of the Woodland Pattern Workshop (music) Ensemble! I enjoyed being part of this collective improvising group--and I feel you were the ideal "improvising conductor"! I felt true magic playing with this group, and am glad we are planning to continue! Carl Raven
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