Hans Tammen (left) and Dafna Naphtali (right) will perform Friday at Columbus Cultural Arts Center — located at 139 W. Main St. Credit: Courtesy of Peter Gannushkin
The romantic and musical partnership between New York City-based experimental musicians Dafna Naphtali and Hans Tammen began in the late ‘90s, when the two met at a concert free jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor was playing in the city.
“I invited [Tammen] to come and record a session with me because we both had an interest in computers, so we started by playing together,” Naphtali said. “We are very, very different in many ways, but in terms of the music we are very much in agreement — not on everything, but most things.”
In 1998, soon after that serendipitous meeting, Naphtali and Tammen formed the musical duo Dangertown to experiment with combinations of sounds and textures, Tammen said.
“I put an emphasis on the word ‘experimental’ because it’s usually defined as something where you do things where the outcome is unforeseen,” Tammen said. “[Dangertown] includes a lot of improvisation. I like situations in music, as in life, where there’s ambiguity, where there’s openness and so on.”
The duo will bring its improvisational electronic compositions to the Columbus Cultural Arts Center — located at 139 W. Main St. — Friday as part of Frequency Fridays, a monthly performance series hosted by Columbus-based arts and technology not-for-profit Fuse Factory.
Along with Dangertown’s performance, the show will include a performance from local modular synth musician Frederick Foxtrott, as well as solo sets from both Naphtali and Tammen.
“The funny thing is that we got invited to this thing independently,” Tammen said. “Later, after [Fuse Factory] figured out we have a duo together, they asked us if we’d also want to play a set together.”
Naphtali said Dangertown originally began as a project focused on electroacoustic music — a genre in which the timbre, texture and audio signals of acoustic sound are manipulated by technology to create sound art — in which she would process and modify the sound of Tammen’s guitar through a computer during live performances.
Tammen said the project has since evolved to focus on synthesis — electronically creating audio signals to manipulate.
“We were given instruments that a friend of ours who died had — a couple of really quirky, crazy synthesizers — and so we did some performances with them,” Tammen said. “As they are kind of big and unwieldy, we will not bring them to Columbus, but the concept is coming with us. We have other instruments that we will play with.”
Naphtali said this change has allowed her to diversify her approach to sound construction.
“The evolution to what we’re doing now was because of these instruments bequeathed to us by the late [New York City-based musician and sound artist] Michael Evans,” Naphtali said. “It was an opportunity for me to step back from my live processing because that was always me with my hands on a computer.”
Tammen said though he usually performs on guitar, his solo set Friday will feature manipulating ambient drones — sustained sounds, notes or tone clusters with minimal harmonic variation — and field recordings with his computer.
“I’m just sitting at the computer and playing it, which is very disembodied. But I’m also interested in that,” Tammen said. “On one hand, I play guitar, and whatever I do with the guitar is totally dependent on my body, on the instrument and everything around it. But sometimes, I want to just have a specific sound happening now; then the computer is great because you can simply press a button.”
Tammen said his work as a solo artist focuses on the conflicting instincts of his mind and body. He said his Friday set will push past the “crazy, high energy” music he frequently plays to something more minimalist and cerebral.
“The ideal instrument would be where the music comes directly out of my brain,” Tammen said. “The beauty of doing a disembodied performance with a computer is that you can hit the computer as hard as you want, but it still makes the same sound. So, if I want to train myself on these drone soundscapes, the computer is a better instrument for me than the guitar because my body comes eventually in and burns a place to the ground.”
Whether playing individually, with Naphtali or another ensemble partner, Tammen said a significant part of improvising is the relationship a performer shares with the audience.
“We interact a lot with the room, and the audience is also part of the room,” Tammen said. “I feel it’s like a three-way thing — me with my performance partners reacting to the room and the resonant frequencies, and how the room sounds with the audiences. I cannot really pin it down because I often play with my eyes closed or I just zone out visually, but there is an energy in the room, and that comes from the audience.”
Naphtali said her solo set will primarily apply the live computer processing she does in collaborative electroacoustic performances to her background as a vocalist trained in classical and jazz voice.
“I’m gonna be just using my voice,” Naphtali said. “I will grab little bits of sound, and then do things to it, like pitch, shift it, process it, delay it, filter it and make a new sound out of it. I’ve become adept at manipulating sound, processing sound.”
Naphtali, a visiting assistant professor of music technology at New York University who received a Master’s of Music Technology from the college in 1996, said her sound and pedagogical approach focuses on computer music — the process of creating music by way of software, algorithms and neural networks.
“I think that these days, everybody uses a computer for everything,” Naphtali said. “What it meant to me, when it was way harder to do computer music, was that you wanted the computer to be doing something that you could not do another way.”
Naphtali said for her, computer music serves as a way to push boundaries in her explorations of pitch, distortion and rhythm. She said her discipline is particularly inspired by experimental composer Conlon Nancarrow, whose compositions with a player piano were physically impossible for humans to perform.
“To me, computer music should be ideally something that is not just being used so I can save money and hire fewer musicians, or so I can write orchestral music without having to have an orchestra, but instead something that is impossible to do with humans,” Naphtali said. “I think that’s way more interesting.”
Doors open at 7:30 p.m. and the show begins at 8 p.m. Tickets are $9.25 before the show, and $10 at the door. For more information, visit Fuse Factory’s website.
