Penultimate Press

I will use the excuse of being very slack on this blog in many months due to working on establishing a 'proper' publishing imprint (words on paper) which is now ready to roll. First cab out the rank is a collection of writings by Graham Lambkin, he formally of the Shadow Ring (of whom we started correspondance after he read that post). It's really odd and a wonderful thing to hold and read. Further details can be found at Penultimate Press

Maryanne Amacher (1943-2009)

When I left Australia there were s a handful of musicians I had in the back of my mind that I would like to see live: Nurse with Wound, Scott Walker, Consumer Electronics, Ghedelia Tazartes, Iancu Dumitrescu, Hermann Nitsch, Charlemagne Palestine... With the exception of the last 2 I have ticked all of this boxes (to varying degrees of satisfaction). Let it rest with high praise for Ghedelia Tazartes. This year there has been some wonderful shows by folks I never thought about, or rather never thought I would see - Omar Souleyman, Scott Foust (ultimate eccentricty) and Magma (holy!). But sad news this weekend as one of the most desired live performers I was hoping to witness at least once in my life has eluded me forever.

Maryanne Amacher was one of the more curious practitioners of sound installation that I have encountered over the years. Her work which was more interested in the perception of sound than strictly the sound itself or rather "Amacher's work is very concerned with what happens after you see and hear".

Although Tzadik released 2 cd's of Amarcher's output, the majority of her work was site specific as the nature of her explorations demanded playing with the architecture of a space, hence my keen interest to 'experience' this live.

"Why do you have to produce your work in this concert hall? Go out and find a beautiful space, a wonderful architecture." Right now we have no buildings dedicated solely to sonic experiences, other than frontal concert stages built for presenting nineteenth century music. This has been a serious problem, even in the last half of the twentieth century, alive with electronic media, multi loudspeakers, and interactive media".

I have heard accounts from friends that attended one of her performances, stories of intense volume via speakers set up in strategic positions (inside other objects, facing walls, up elevator shafts etc) all over the venue (usually warehouse spaces and the like). A different sonic world is experienced in every room as she had sculptured the audio specific the parameters within. One could wander freely and experience Amarcher's theories/experiments first hand. All of this 'sound in space' is not so dissimilar to what the GRM were doing with the Acousmonium but keep in mind this was in America, by just one person, not an institution.

"She talked about what she was doing as experimental acoustics and justifiably critiqued the "official" field as being in its infancy, relying on faulty tools of measurement rather than extensive first-person phenomenological research".

She was a student of Stockhausen, a one time member of MEV and a post Cage thinker who sat more in line with the 60's scientific analysis of sound matter along the lines of Alvin Lucier. But for her, the sound coming out of he speakers was not the key interest.



"Ms. Amacher, calmly but theatrically adjusting the knobs on her control panel, made the music sound as if 1,000 cicadas had settled on the inside of the ear; the music sprang from inside a listener's head - an unusual experience. " - Peter Watrous New York Times 1988

"At EMPAC she was using about 40 channels of audio, only about 4 were actually inside the theater! The rest were as far as three levels beneath, with carefully measured apertures created by doors, air vents, and so forth" Micah Silver, Oct 23, 2009

Amacher was also interested in the concept of time, the redundancy of composition and limitation on composers and players held no interest;

"The development of this expansive time spectrum in emergent technologies is for me today what an extended sonic spectrum that included noise was for Cage in 1937. As the possibilities of the "all sound music of the future" were to Cage, the possibilities of "all time music" are to me. In the twenty first century, new time worlds will be explored just as composers in the twentieth century explored new sounds".

Her approach to sound art was a always moving on a different current to those around her whilst, at the same time, being lauded by the European hard nuts and the American noise punks.

"Recent scientific experiments at Johns Hopkins have shown that our ears continue to emit sound for a few seconds after death, establishing that our ears not only receive and absorb sound, but also emit sound (referred to by researchers as "otoacoustic emissions").

Maryanne Amacher died on the 22nd of Oct at age 66.

Cage's Influence
Extremities: Maryanne Amacher in Conversation

Nekrotzar

Roland Topor's design for Nekrotzar (György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre -Teatro Comunale di Bologna 1979)

Amazon marketplace can be a fine way of picking up cheap books. I skimped off a pound (!) to buy a second hand copy of a book recently. It arrived in 2 days (nice) the cover and condition looked almost new (super) and then i open up to see the last reader had underlined enormous parts of the text and added their own notes in the margins. This can be annoying as it only serves as a distraction to the reading 'flow' ( a VERY important sentence awaits you in 247 words time!) Ah, balls I thought, I should have been informed of this, have I been ripped off? should i have coughed up the extra squid for the new kaboodle? Then, as I continued to browse I noticed the underliner, this chronic note taker was also a crafty arter, having filled in what would have otherwise been a boring title page with the following pic. I flipped and was chuffed i was now in possession of a rather nifty, rather freaky sketch by an anonymous who?

"For in chess, he says, every pawn can become a queen"