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Composer and improviser Hans Tammen performs with a remarkable collection of mechanical preparations on his guitars, in site-specific performances, and collaborative efforts with dance, light actions or other art forms. With various sized ensembles and as a solo performer, he gives concerts and performances at festivals and other venues throughout Europe, in the US and Canada, Russia and Mexico. He has released CDs with Denman Maroney, Michael Vorfeld, Ursel Schlicht, Dominic Duval and Jay Rosen among others. His solo CD on Nur/Nicht/Nur was released 1999. Critic Klaus Hübner recommended it -- "Anyone who's still says that experimentalism, especially on guitar, has no future, should hear Hans Tammen's Endangered Guitar."

While the rest of the avant garde was warping sound through extended techniques, pianists were still stuck with those 88 damn keys that sounded pretty much the same no matter how you pushed them.

Now comes Denman Maroney who has wrung something very different indeed from his piano. He calls his techniques "Hyperpiano" involving bowing, striking, plucking, strumming, stopping and sliding the piano's strings with various objects. Once you get past the "gee whiz, how'd he do that" stage, you find yourself in the midst of shimmering partials hovering luminescent in the air like aurora borealis. And after a while, you lose consciousness of the fact that you are listening to a piano at all. It's all very beautiful and quite unearthly.

Billabong
   Hans Tammen (endangered guitar)
   Denman Maroney (hyperpiano)

“Denman Maroney, whose technique has come to focus almost entirely on the interior of the piano. He has mapped his territory, paced it out and demarcated it with numerous vehicles - his bars, bowls, knives, blocks, boxes, bottles, mallets, mashers, bells and Ebows. Yet he is still enchanted by it and still capable of being surprised by its contours.

Hans Tammen's guitar has been seized, carried away from its familiar territories and reconstructed elsewhere, according to no particular rules besides the rigors of what needs to be done. He is an unusually meticulous player whose work seems aimed at the guitar itself, a de-invention of the thing not by dismantling any physical object but by reverse-engineering its sound-world, breaking it up into strings, pickups, wood, effects, possibilities, whispers. The clock and schlip and crack of wood, the bleep and squirt of electronics.” -- Richard Cochrane

"Throughout, the duo elicits a distinct sense of playful mayhem via their nearly indescribable methods of execution and often mind-bending yet incredibly seductive improvisations." -- Glen Astarita, All About Jazz

"When I saw this in the mail, I burst out laughing and said to myself, 'Brilliant! A natural pairing.'  Having seen each in performance, and on their previous discs, I knew to expect players who as partners are listeners, and as creators, are so in touch with their respective instruments ("touch" being the signifier) that they are one." -- Steven Koenig

"Since sound explorers like the American Maroney and German Tammen have decided to devote their careers to inserting objects under a piano's strung frame or radically detuning and reverse-engineering an electric guitar, they should really be celebrated for the new tones they create." (Ken Waxman, jazzweekly.com, Fall 2000)

8 tracks in 67 minutes.   More Potlatch

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