Hans Tammen

Hans Tammen is just another worker in rhythms, frequencies and intensities. He likes to set sounds in motion, and then sit back to watch the movements unfold. Using textures, timbre and dynamics as primary elements, his music is continuously shifting, with different layers floating into the foreground while others disappear. This flows like clockwork, “transforming a sequence of instrumental gestures into a wide territory of semi-hostile discontinuity; percussive, droning, intricately colorful, or simply blowing your socks off” (Touching Extremes).

Awards

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

Gear

He plays electronics, synthesizers and guitars, and writes for and conducts large ensembles, notably his all-electronic Dark Circuits Orchestra, and the 18-piece chamber-jazz ensemble Third Eye Orchestra, both founded in 2005. In 2021 FLUX String Quartet commissioned him to write a large work for string quartet and live electronics

Jason Kao Hwang: Myths of Origin

Read "Myths of Origin" reviewed by Jerome Wilson

by Jerome Wilson
August 20, 2025

Violinist and composer Jason Kao Hwang has worked with groups of every size, from duos up to full orchestras. “Myths of Origin" is one of his large-scale pieces, an imposing 42-minute work for an improvising string orchestra and drum set. It runs without interruption, but the recording breaks it down into nine sections. The music starts slowly, rising in a mass of seething bowed strings with a slight trace of Asian melody. It progresses into a dense cloud ...

Album Review

Dom Minasi: Eight Hands One Mind

Read "Eight Hands One Mind" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
May 2, 2021

Restlessly innovative, guitarist Dom Minasi is a stalwart of the creative music scene. A brilliant improviser and composer, Minasi deftly utilizes his inventive ideas as launching points for his equally exciting extemporizations. On the unique Eight Hands One Mind, Minasi joins three other intrepid guitarists for a fiery and poignant tribute to another trailblazer, the late guitarist Bern Nix. The others in the group are the master of prepared guitar Hans Tammen, the virtuoso Harvey Valdes and the ...

272

Album Review

Hans Tammen: Third Eye Orchestra

Read "Third Eye Orchestra" reviewed by Marc Medwin

by Marc Medwin
December 12, 2009

This is a stunning live recording from one of improvised music's most fascinating proponents. Hans Tammen has gathered a dream team of 13 improvising musicians, but that's hardly the totality of this project, which combines composed material with extemporization to create a score whose modus operandi is constant change on every level. This is one of those discs that verbiage won't encapsulate. The music on offer here is not to be compartmentalized, though it exists in discrete ...

505

Album Review

Hans Tammen Third Eye Orchestra: Hans Tammen Third Eye Orchestra

Read "Hans Tammen Third Eye Orchestra" reviewed by Jakob Baekgaard

by Jakob Baekgaard
January 31, 2009

In jazz circles, New York is known for cultivating the sounds of the cutting edge; club Roulette has shown a particular seismographic ability to know what's happening at the fringes of jazz. If anything, the release of Hans Tammen Third Eye Orchestra underlines this with striking clarity.

An innovative avant-garde guitar guru, Hans Tammen is mostly known for his elusive technique of endangered guitar, but he's also the visionary behind the interesting contemporary avant-garde ensemble, The Third Eye Orchestra. Hans ...

130

Recording

Hans Tammen's Third Eye Orchestra Released on Innova

Source: All About Jazz
October 10, 2008

In 2006 thirteen of the most virtuosic New York instrumentalists to ever elude labels or boundaries came together at Roulette for an evening length performance to perform Hans Tammen's THIRD EYE ORCHESTRA. Not your usual “orchestra”, this musical vision takes the form of structured spontaneity cued live by the composer. In this concept, composer Hans Tammen works with a score that is rearranged every time the piece is performed. Given the multiple results which issue from ...
read more

Event

Hans Tammen & Dafna Naphtali @ Black Box Theater, Asbury Park 1/20/05

Source: All About Jazz
January 12, 2005

Our fourth in the premiere season of Music of Invention concerts at the Black Box of Asbury Park happens Thursday, Jan. 20 at 8 p.m. and features the duo mechanique(s) (Hans Tammen, endangered guitar and Dafna Naphtali, voice). Area audiences know them best through their involvement with Harvestworks, the digital multimedia atelier in New York. Both performers augment their instruments with computers and electronics, remixing and altering each other's sounds as well as their own, to create richly textured electroacoustic ...
read more

"..a killer tour de force of post everything guitar damage." (Larry Nai, Signal To Noise) "...clearly one of the best experimental guitarists to come forward during the 1990s." (François Couture, All Music Guide) "Hans Tammen has his own way of playing the guitar..." (New York Times) "...one of the most ferociously talented and inventive guitarists to emerge in the last ten years. His technique is noisy and percussive, his energy relentless and unstoppable." (Richard Cochrane, Musings) "White-hot solo guitar work... Recent years have seen a slew of fine free guitarists emerge..., but nothing they've done so far packs this kind of punch..