Arias + Wooley + Tammen

For the last 24 years Ricardo Arias has used sound to improvise and compose with. Recently he has increasingly more often started to think, write, research, and teach about it also. He uses unconventional instruments and found objects as sound sources for his work and since 1992 has focused almost exclusively on the balloon kit, a number of rubber balloons attached to a suitable structure and played with the hands and a set of accessories, including various kinds of sponges, pieces of Styrofoam, rubber bands, etc. Using this contraption as his main instrument, he collaborates with a large pool of experimental and improvising musicians from around the world, including Mazen Kerbaj, Jane Rigler, Chris Mann, Anne Wellmer, Andrew Drury, David Watson, Sean Meehan, Jack Wright, Tatsuya Nakatani, Vic Rawlings, Michel Doneda, Gabriel Paiuk , Leonel Kaplan, Nate Wooley, Pauline Oliveros, Hans Tammen, Miquel Jordá, Carlos Gómez, Roberto García, Alex Waterman, Juan Sebastián Suanca, Miguel Frasconi, Michael Zerang, and Pascal Boudreault, among many others. Since 2007, he is a n Assitant Professor in the Art Department at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.

Nate Wooley was born in 1974 in Clatskanie, Oregon, a small timber and fishing community near the mouth of the Columbia River.  He began playing trumpet professionally with his father at the age of 13.  After schooling at the University of Oregon and University of Denver and informal studies with Ron Miles, Art Lande and Jack Wright, he moved to Jersey City, New Jersey in the spring of 2001.  Since his arrival in New York, Nate has become a much sought after sideman in jazz, experimental music, new music, dance and rock circles, working regularly with artists as diverse as Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Paul Lytton, Evan Parker, Akron Family, David Grubbs, C. Spencer Yeh, Chris Corsano, Mary Halvorson, and Taylor Ho Bynum. He has also become one of the small handful of American trumpet players, along with Greg Kelley and Peter Evans present on the international music scene pushing beyond the physical boundaries of the instrument through deconstruction of the instrument itself and its historical context.  His solo work stands side by side with both Evans and Kelley (as well as European’s Axel Dorner and Franz Hautzinger among others) in a growing canon of early 21st century experimental trumpet music.

Hans Tammen creates music that has been described as an alien world of bizarre textures and a journey through the land of unending sonic operations. He produces rapid-fire juxtapositions of radically contrastive and fascinating sounds, with micropolyphonic timbres and textures, aggressive sonic eruptions, but also quiet pulses and barely audible noises – through means of his ENDANGERED GUITAR and interactive software programming, by working with the room itself, and, as a critic observed, with his “…fingers stuck in a high voltage outlet”. Signal To Noise called his works “…a killer tour de force of post-everything guitar damage”, All Music Guide recommended him: “…clearly one of the best experimental guitarists to come forward during the 1990s.”

His numerous projects include site-specific performances and collaborative efforts with dance, light, video, and theatre, utilizing technology from planetarium projectors to guitar robots and disklavier pianos. He received a Fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) in the category Digital/Electronic Arts in 2009 for the ENDANGERED GUITAR – a hybrid guitar/software instrument used to control interactive live sound processing.