User:Intaglio Studio/Hal rammel

Best known as an instrument inventor and improvising musician, Hal Rammel has utilized found and recycled materials since the mid 1970s to craft a series of one-of-a-kind 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 the Chicago's near northside).

In addition to his work as an improviser and composer, Rammel has been involved in the visual arts, has authored a study of surrealism and American folklore titled Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias, produces a weekly experimental music show on Milwaukee’s WMSE-FM, and curates a concert series at Woodland Pattern Book Center called Alternating Currents Live. In the 1990s he wrote extensively 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.