User:Intaglio Studio

Best known as an instrument inventor and improvising musician, Hal Rammel has utilized found and recycled materials since the mid 1970s to craft a unique series of acoustic and amplified musical instruments. These include the triolin, the single-string snath, the hydro-aerolin, and the instrument he has concentrated on in the past ten years, the amplified palette. Many of these instruments grew out of his regular performances with cellist Russell Thorne in the mid 1980s at the Emergency Theater in Chicago (in back of Thorne’s Occult Bookstore on Chicago's near northside). Throughout the 80s and 90s he continued to record and perform with many musicians in the midwest's active improvised and experimental music scene.

In addition to his work as an improviser and composer, Rammel has been involved in the visual arts (two self-published books fo drawings in the 1970s and two comic books in the 1980s published by Black Swan Press), has authored a study of surrealism and American folklore titled Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias (a cultural and historical investigation into the song "The Big Rock Candy Mountain"), produces a weekly experimental music show on Milwaukee’s WMSE-FM called Alternating Currents, and curates a concert series at Woodland Pattern Book Center called Alternating Currents Live. In the 1990s he wrote frequently for the journal Experimental Musical Instruments contributing lengthy studies of the history of one-man bands and unusual folk instruments like the bumbass and devils fiddle.