Penumbra Music Collection, 1994-2015

Penumbra Music was founded in Milwaukee in 1994 by experimental multi-instrumentalist, composer/improvisor, author, and visual artist Hal Rammel. During the 1980s, Rammel was an active member of Chicago's experimental and improvised music scene performing frequently with Gene Coleman, Michael Zerang, John Corbett, Terri Kapsalis, Lou Mallozzi, Jim Baker, Don Meckley, and others. He has given many solo and ensemble performances and directed workshops at the Experimental Sound Studio. He has also been designing and building musical instruments since 1977 and is known for playing these original instruments as well as the singing saw.

During his teenage years, Hal exhibited an interest in literature and the visual arts and in jazz and blues. His parents, both artists themselves, encouraged his interests and he moved to Chicago in the sixties. Inspired by the innovative work of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), he began experimenting with the musical saw and an array of homemade musical instruments. His first public performance was with Birmingham-based improvisers Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith at the Emergency Theater (part of cellist Russell Thorne’s Occult Bookstore near Clark and Belmont in Chicago). He soon made contact with many Chicago improvisers including Gene Coleman, John Corbett, and Michael Zerang and made his first recordings at ESS as part of their “Sounds from Chicago” cassette series. His first workshops for ESS on experimental musical instrument design began soon after these first meetings.

Before beginning the Penumbra Music label, Hal Rammel released two cassette on the Cloud Eight label both recorded and mastered at ESS. The second, “Music from the Jaws of Sound,” was his first solo recording on the amplified palette.

Hal Rammel moved from Chicago to Cedarburg, WI in 1992. From 1992 until 2014, he hosted the radio show Alternating Currents on WMSE-FM in Milwaukee. He has curated the Alternating Currents Live concert series at Woodland Pattern Book Center from 1995 to the present. He taught musical instrument design and construction at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago for many years in the mid 1990s and presented instrument building classes for various Milwaukee area elementary schools under the support of Meet the Composer. He continued his involvement with the Chicago area improvised music scene and began new collaborations with Milwaukee musicians Steve Nelson-Raney and Thomas Gaudynski. He continues to perform and record, mostly in the Milwaukee area, with Christopher Burns, Linda Binder, Matt Turner, and many others.

Hal Rammel’s unique handmade instruments include the electro-acoustic sound palette, the interocyter, the triolin, and bibliolin. In 2013, fourteen instruments designed and built by Hal Rammel were included in the permanent collection of the National Music Museum in Vermillion, SD. These acquisitions include many acoustic instruments built in the early 1990s that figured prominently in his work with Chicago improvisers and in his early recordings on Penumbra Music label. The National Music Museum also acquired four amplified palettes dating from 1997 to 2010.

Penumbra Music has served as a major outlet for avant-garde and experimental music in the Midwest since its founding. The label has released 14 compact discs and 4 7” 45 rpm singles featuring music by Michael Zerang, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Jon Mueller, Tom Hamilton, Terri Kapsalis, Peter Zummo, Matt Turner, John Corbett, Hal Rammel, Steve Nelson-Raney, Thomas Gaudynski, and many others. Many of the records celebrated releases and performances in both Milwaukee and Chicago at venues including the HotHouse, Lunar Cabaret, Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Rammel has been a frequent contributor to publications such as Experimental Musical Instruments, Musical Traditions, the improviser and Rubberneck. He is an artist who creates drawings, cartoons, and collages which have appeared in several mediums such as Cultural Correspondence and Arsenal. His work has been shown at the National Music Museum (Vermillion, SD), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), the Wustum Museum of Fine Art (Racine, WI), Gallery 1926 (Chicago), Woodland Pattern Book Center (Milwaukee), Corbett vs. Dempsey (Chicago), and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI). His photographs have been reproduced on the covers of compact discs released by Hat Art (Zurich), Allos Musica (Chicago), Penumbra Music (Grafton, WI), and Long Arms (Moscow). His work as a cartoonist has appeared in several volumes including, most recently, Conversations in the Aether (Penumbra Music, 2014). A retrospective catalog of his comics and cartoons has been published by Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery in Chicago as Aero Through the Ages.

As of 2015, the Penumbra Music label is still creating new music. Its most recent release, Scrawl, is the work of Hal Rammel on amplified palette and Christopher Burns on electric guitar.

The Penumbra Music Collection is arranged in two series: audio and documents. The audio contains two subseries: commercial releases and separated audio. There are twenty-two commercial releases from the Penumbra Music label in the first subseries. The second subseries contains forty-one CDs which were separated from the documents series; they are mostly additional recordings accumulated from studio and live recordings. The recordings span the period between 1994 and 2015. A number of influential experimental musicians including John Corbett and Steve Nelson-Raney are involved in the recordings as well as instruments designed and handmade by Hal Rammel. The documents series includes papers largely from the administration of the label, but also contains magazine clippings, correspondence with studios, distributors, and magazines, event announcements, and other ephemera. Of greatest interest might be the original pieces of artwork for the albums or event announcements. These consist of photographs, drawings, and other designs and prints.

The audio contains two subseries: commercial releases and separated audio. There are twenty-two commercial releases from the Penumbra Music label in the first subseries. The second subseries contains forty-one CDs which were separated from the documents series; they are mostly additional recordings accumulated from studio and live recordings.

Material is available to interested researchers by appointment.

All material is copyright restricted to the individual artists that appear in the recordings.

The collection was donated by Hal Rammel to the Creative Audio Archive in the summer of 2015.

Sally Conkright and Allison Schein, Fall 2015