Resonant Frequency
Resonant Frequency #64
Maryanne Amacher and Stepping Into It
In spring 1999, a friend turned 30 and we threw him a party. It was in a warehouse loft, which a friend of a friend's dot-com company was going to be moving into because they were expanding (not an unusual situation during that era). So there were 50 or so people in this large, raw industrial space that would soon be an office of some kind. A sound system was rented. There was some miscommunication with the rental company regarding square footage (the figure given was for several floors of this empty building, instead of just the one room) so the P.A. wound up being far more powerful than was necessary. It was a great party.
The day after, we were cleaning up, gathering the cups and sweeping the floor, and I had something I wanted to try before we unplugged the speakers and returned them. I had recently purchased a CD that was known to produce a strange effect, but it was said to work best at high volume-- the kind of volume that's hard to produce in a crowded apartment building surrounded by neighbors. This was my chance to see if it worked. I cued up a track and turned up the gain and the couple of friends with me put down their brooms and trash bags and stood in the vicinity of the P.A. It was loud, man, much louder than anyone would ever dream of playing music at home, and then something strange started to happen. The music, I had read, was designed with some odd psycho-acoustic properties that made the sound seem to be coming from inside of your skull and moving outward through your ears. It sounds so odd and otherworldly, it's hard to even imagine what this feeling might be like. But this track came as advertised: A swarm of high-pitched beeps-- what sounded like sine waves in the 2khz range-- created an effect where sound seemed to be starting inside of the head, shooting from of my ears like a fountain of auditory sparks.
The piece in question was called "Head Rhythm 1 / Plaything 2", and it was found on a then-new CD called Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear), on John Zorn's Tzadik label. The composer was a woman named Maryanne Amacher. I had read about the CD in an article in the March 1999 issue of The Wire and picked it up very shortly after. That Wire article, by Alan Licht, was the kind of piece that fired the imagination and started me dreaming about a world of sound I never knew existed. You can read it here. Amacher was a sound artist who had been active for 30 years, but she was new to me. During the previous three decades, she had devised installations and created sound scores in collaboration with artists including John Cage and Merce Cunningham. In 1967, she made a work called City Links that involved transmitting sounds from one space to another, distant one via a series of microphones and what the article called "telelinks." Transmitting through the telephone, in other words, collapsing space so that the sonic environment of a factory, say, would be heard in real-time in a gallery hundreds of miles away, and was mixed with sounds coming from other far-flung locations, as well as the sound in the room. In 1999, when dial-up modems were still slow and downloading a small bit of text from a remove computer was still an uncertainty, the thought that the piece had been realized 30 years early seemed nothing short of visionary.
Licht's piece made clear that, for Amacher, sound was less a medium than a way of life. She lived inside of the pieces, in at least one case literally:
"She took the idea further by installing a microphone on a window overlooking the ocean at the New England Fish Exchange in Boston Harbor, 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 [sic] Leah Durner in 1989. 'I learned a lot about shapes and I realized 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.'"
Amacher's chosen medium was the installation, and Sound Characters was her first proper album. She had never made a record before, because the two-channel home stereo environment left too much to chance, and she didn't like the idea of her work being compromised to fit such a limited delivery system. Her canvas was large, and the CD was so very small, so she wasn't sure if her work would come across on this limited scale.
An interesting thing about the three tracks of "third ear music" on Sound Characters (other pieces, ranging from textured drone to splintering noise music, have a more familiar in construction) is that they have almost no effect when heard through headphones. You need to hear them through the air-- maybe a physicist or an Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor could explain why. But the point is, Sound Characters works only in a certain way-- through speakers-- which happens to be a way of listening to music that is becoming less important every year. Given the effect, and the ease with which it could become meaningless, it's no surprise that Maryanne Amacher was hesitant to release a CD. She wanted very badly to control the details of her music, not just the raw sound material but how the speakers were positioned and how loudly it was played and what the room was like. She imagined her music as a total immersive experience, and had trouble letting go of that and allowing listeners at home to have the final say. It's the film director's lament: the projectionist always has final cut.
For some artists, this lack of control is a horrifying. Earlier this year Jim O'Rourke released The Visitor, his first album of new music in a few years. And he made a point not to make it available for download from anywhere. You were supposed to buy a physical copy to hear it. Here's what he told Ben Ratliff of The New York Times:
"'You can no longer use context as part of your work,' he said, glumly, 'because it doesn't matter what you do, somebody's going to change the context of it. The confusion of creativity, making something, with this Internet idea of democratization...' he trailed off, disgusted. 'It sounds like old-man stuff, but I think it's disastrous for the possibilities of any art form.'"
You can download O'Rourke's album, of course-- illegally. But its construction-- a single track, almost 40 minutes long, with lots of space and quiet and subtle detail-- flies in the face of where music is headed. This thing that he cares about is disappearing. People at the forefront of technology tell us that the future belongs to customization. People want interactivity, to have their media arranged and delivered according to their particular desires and preferences. Anything standing in the way of that risks being marginalized. But the method of delivery and consumption is just a part of it-- it extends much further. People also want to get inside the music and see how it works and maybe even have a say about the basic elements of construction. There is no end product, and content is never fixed. Maybe the same people listening to music in front of their computers will take a few samples, their favorite bits from a few different records, and combine them into something of their own. Now they're making music, not just listening to it. How important are those lines?
The O'Rourkes of the world may argue that this trend is a bad thing, but it's obviously going to open a new world of experience, and right now we're just scratching the surface of possibility. There's already art being built out of out of interactivity, customization, and lack of ownership-- bits of content floating around the ether, constantly being picked up and reassembled-- and soon enough it'll morph into something just as interesting that we can't even conceive of at this point. These are exciting times.
And yet. When I found out that Maryanne Amacher died last week, of a stroke, at age 66, my mind went back to that Sunday afternoon in 1999, hearing her music shooting out of my head, an indescribably strange experience I've replicated only a few times since. I listened to the CD the way she wanted me to when I could, which was not often, and until this week I hadn't played it in years. But I heard it enough times to confirm that she was right all along: Sound Characters-- this music, her way-- changed the way that I think about music, even though it was so difficult to get everything just so. In a sense it comes down to trust. With both Amacher and O'Rourke, I need to believe that context matters, that both of these artists know what they're doing, and that something interesting will happen if I give myself over to their work in a very particular way. And in both cases, it's paid off. Amacher wasn't in that room on that day, but that seismic moment belonged to her as much as it did to me, and I'm thankful for it.
Previous Columns
- Resonant Frequency #63: YouTube and Memory May 29, 2009
- Resonant Frequency #62: Twilight in Boston April 17, 2009
- Resonant Frequency #61: That Voice Again (Again) October 17, 2008
- Resonant Frequency #60: That Voice Again September 5, 2008
- Resonant Frequency #59: Broken Thoughts and Hand-Me-Downs August 1, 2008
- Resonant Frequency #58: Five Notes Toward an Essay on the Primacy of the Song June 6, 2008
- Resonant Frequency #57: Perfect World May 9, 2008
- Resonant Frequency #56: There Must Be a Spanish Word for This Feeling April 11, 2008
- Resonant Frequency #55: King Carp in a Dan Ryan Ditch March 7, 2008
- Resonant Frequency #54: Shimmer, Then Disappear February 8, 2008
- Interviews: The Flaming Lips
- Staff Lists: The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s: 20-1
- Staff Lists: Top 100 Albums of the 1990s
- Staff Lists: The 50 Best Albums of 2008
- Staff Lists: The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s: 50-21
- Staff Lists: The Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s: 20-1
- Staff Lists: The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s
- Interviews: Spike Jonze
- Staff Lists: Top 100 Albums of the 1970s
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- Staff Lists: The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s
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