Maryanne Amacher: Expressway to Your Skull

Recently I saw Peter Bogdanovich introduce a screening of Orson Welle’s Chimes at Midnight in New York. Bogdanovich explained that Welles had once told him, “The problem with films is that they’re canned, they come in a can!” Bogdanovich asked what he meant, “Well,” Welles replied, “anything that comes in a can can’t be very fresh.”

I think the electronic composer Maryanne Amacher would agree with him. Her new CD, Sound Characters (Making The Third Ear), presents an unusual paradox: how can a fantastic recorded listening experience also be a hopelessly inadequate representation of an artist’s work with sound? As a sound artist with a reputation for overwhelming volume, precise speaker placement, and site-specific environmental and architectural installations, Amacher has never released a full-length recording before. Until now the only pieces of her on record were her contributions to the Asphodel label’s Throne of/Swarm Of Drones trilogy of compilations. Yet despite her invisibility as a recording artist, Maryanne Amacher is an experimental music veteran, whose presence has been an important influence on artists working in related soundworlds.

“Maryanne is one of the best kept secrets of the Cage/Tudor scene,” says Paul D Miller aka DJ Spooky. “She was one of the first people of that set to really deal with heavy bass, electronic bass, crazy bass.” Rhys Chatham is also quick to sing her praises. Meeting her at Morton Subotnick’s studio when he was still in his teens, she “became a kind of role model for me of what a composer should be,” he remarks. “I’ve always been inspired by Maryanne, and her work had a profound influence of the music I made in the 70s and 80's:

Amacher’s first major work dates back to 1967’s City Links series, which continues (in theory) to the present day. In 22 separate pieces, sounds from one or more distant urban environments were transmitted in real-time via telelinks to an exhibition space as a continuous sound installation. All kinds of locales were used, harbours, steel mills, factories, airports, etc. In City Links 15, sounds from New York, Boston and Paris were mixed in a live broadcast at WBAI in New York and then further transmitted to Radio France Musique in Paris – Long before the internet made such intercontinental practices common. “I was particularly interested in the experience of ‘Synchronicity’, hearing spaces distant from each other at the same time, which we do not experience in our lives,” she explains, noting that quite often a “flurry of activity” would occur in two different places at the same time. One example is the piece No More Miles, in which she placed a microphone in a Budget Rent-A-Car unit in an indoor arcade in Minneapolis, which was the acoustic double of the exhibitions space’s acoustics: voices, footsteps and other sounds completely matched those heard in the gallery. Visiting the gallery, you would hear the sounds produced by the installation as though people were moving and talking around you, like, “ghosts in the otherwise silent space She took the idea further by installing a microphone on a window overlooking the ocean at the New England Fish Exchange in Boston Harbour, transmitting the sound into her home studio continuously, sometimes using it as an element in other performances or exhibitions of City Links. “I would come in and it would be different according to different weather and changes,” Amacher told interview Leah Durner in 1989. “I learned a lot about shapes and I realised why I was doing this: in regular music you don’t have any models to learn about spatial aspects of music. Usually the performers are on stage, or the music’s on a record, and you don’t really hear things far away or close up: you don’t hear things appearing or disappearing, and all the shapes that emerge from this.” She lived with the live transmission for three years. “I actually miss coming home to it,” she says now, some 20 years later.