The Extended Guitars with Erhard Hirt, Hans Tammen, Nick Didkovsky and Douglas Repetto play contemporary tabletop guitar music - sounds that seem chaotic on the surface, with a forest of apparently separate details, interlinked underneath, woven together as a maze of infinite complexity. Originally formed in 1996 by Erhard Hirt and Hans Tammen, the quartet’s other current members are Nick Didkovsky and Keith Rowe. Rowe was not able to be in New York at this time.
Look at: http://www.tammen.org/ens_xtg.html
Erhard Hirt (Münster) - http://www.erhardhirt.de
Since the 1970s Erhard Hirt is actively involved in improvised and experimental music as a musician and promoter as well. In his electro-acoustic works he focuses on sound as a powerful tool for musical expression. He started playing blues guitar when he was 16 and played with jazz-oriented groups, experimental rock bands, free jazz combos, and toured with blues bands). Since 1978 he plays also regularly solo.
Hans Tammen (New York) - http://www.tammen.org
Hans Tammen is a composer/guitarist whose music has been described as an alien world of bizarre textures and a journey through the land of unending sonic operations. He discovers hidden sound properties through means of his modified ENDANGERED GUITAR, interactive software programming, stereo and multichannel sound systems, and by working with the room itself. 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.”
Nick Didkovsky is a guitarist, composer, and computer music programmer. Since 1983, he composes for his the avant-rock septet Doctor Nerve, and he also well known as a member of the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet. He presently resides in New York City, where he composes, programs music software, and teaches computer music composition at NYU. His work with Doctor Nerve joins the furious energy of rock with intricate composition, some of which finds its origins in rich software systems of his own design. His non-didactic approach to combining human and machine creativity is his unique fingerprint in a musical world that pushes the boundaries of rock music, algorithmic composition, and contemporary classical formal systems.
Douglas Repetto (New York) - http://music.columbia.edu/~douglas/portfolio/index.shtml
Douglas Irving Repetto is an artist and teacher. His work, including sculpture, installation, performance, recordings, and software is presented internationally. He is the founder of a number of art/community-oriented groups including dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity, ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show, organism: making art with living systems, and the music-dsp mailing list and website. Douglas is Director of Research at the Columbia University Computer Music Center and lives in New York City with his wife, writer Amy Benson; two cute/bad cats, Pokey and Sneezy; and many plants. For this quartet improvisation at ISSUE Project Room he has bred a small army of bio-activated electro-mechanical creatures that produce small and terrifying noises.