“Right now we do not make music unless we are in the same room together. Music is made ONLY between men and women in ONE room, ONE field, or in ONE building between rooms through loudspeaker and microphone transmission....The music we make is confining us to ONE PLACE situations ALL THE TIME. Receptive to our own structure ONLY as we are making them....Long-distance music is developing occasions where boundaries of ONE PLACE situations can vanish, bringing spaces distant from each other together in time.” - Maryanne Amacher
Maryanne Amacher (1938 - 2009) was an installation artist and composer who made notable contributions to the worlds of sound art and electronic music. She is most commonly known for her work studying the psychoacoustic effects of difference tones and auditory distortion products, exploring the ways sound can convey a type of architecture. Throughout her career she embarked on three major sound installations - “City-Links” (1967-1988), “Music for Sound Joined Rooms” (1980 ) and the “Mini Sound Series” (1985- ) -- exploring the different ways sound can traverse space and the various ways it can be perceived and even shaped.
This first series titled "City-Links" consisted of 22 separate projects spanning the course of 19 years, from 1967 to 1988. Through these projects, Amacher sought to connect the sounds of different spaces through live broadcasts in an effort to illustrate that music can not only travel across time, but space as well. The series began in Buffalo in 1967 where she placed eight microphones in various parts of the city and had the sound transmitted across high frequency open telephone lines where they were broadcast over live radio for 28 hours. Throughout these projects Amacher began to introduce new elements, including the live mixing of the audio being transmitted from these remote spaces, inserting pre-recorded material either from the current city or previous ones, and eventually adding in live instrumental improvisation. Her goal was to really understand the natural sounds of an area and to bring them into conscious awareness, often focusing on discovering their resonant frequencies. After Buffalo, she went on to work in other major cities including Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York City, Miami, and worked with notable musicians such as George Lewis, John Cage and Eberhard Blum.
In searching for creative alternatives to make music together, we took inspiration from Amacher's “City-Links” project and sought to create our own version with the technology we have today. The 5 participants in this project recorded a space of their choosing in 5 different locations, over a span of 5 days. Then three members created an instrumental improvisation over these recordings to create an additional layer. Then our audio engineer Tyler was given all of these recordings to live mix together for the final performance, which you will see in this video of his Ableton Live set. In the spirit of Maryanne Amacher, we hope to connect the sounds of 5 towns and cities in New York and Minnesota with the sounds of your living room.
Recorded by: Stefanie Proulx, Luke Paulino, Shannyn Rinker, Tyler Neidermayer, Yoshi Weinberg
Check it out on our May 2020 EP: infrasoundnyc....
www.infrasound...
15 сен 2024
