RIP Maryanne Amacher, 1943-2009

RIP Maryanne Amacher, 1943-2009. Tony Antoniadis hipped me to Amacher just last year, he couldn’t believe I’d never heard her Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear), on Tzadik. “The music is coming from WITHIN your ears,” he told me one afternoon while we held court in Freebird Books. Kyle Gann remembers “She lived in a huge old house in Kingston that was cluttered wall to wall with papers, tapes, and technical equipment, among which one walked gingerly through narrow paths. You closed doors carefully, too, for fear the entire soggy house would fall down. But she was some kind of genius, and her spatially intricate sound installations, better appreciated in Europe than here, had to be heard live: there is no way to adequately document them on recording. As with La Monte Young, you felt that her ears were picking up things yours couldn’t.” This video, entitled Daytrip Maryanne is from a visit Thurston Moore made to Amacher, her house, and her sound.

Item originally posted to WeekendWindow tumblr