Maryanne Amacher

Maryanne Amacher is a composer and installation artist who creates dramatic sonic and visual environments, using both studio-produced sounds and projected images.

For this special Lampo performance, she has selected variations on her Maastunnel Sound Characters, which is music she originally presented in 1998 in the three-story Maastunnel, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She chose this material to work with the narrow proportions of Odum.

Here, Amacher will spend several days in the performance space before the concert. She begins her process with a period of intensive  acoustic research—in this case, slowly developing a detailed sound design for Odum that explores the resonant qualities of the interior and that interacts with the building’s structural characteristics. Her multichannel loudspeaker placement, in contrast to a frontally staged concert production, creates the effect that sounds originate from specific locations, or even from inside the listener’s head, rather than from the loudspeakers themselves.

She explains, “Tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds.”

Maryanne Amacher (b.1938, Kane, Penn.) has presented her work all the world in three ongoing series of multimedia installations—City Links, Music for Sound-Joined Rooms, and Mini-Sound Series—for institutions including the Kitchen, PS1 and the Whitney Museum (New York, N.Y.), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, Minn.), daadgalerie (Berlin, Germany), Kunsthalle Basel (Switzerland), Kunstahalle Krems (Austria), and the Tokushima 21st Century Cultural Information Center (Japan). Several recordings of her work have recently been released: Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear) (Tzadik, 1999) and works from Asphodel—The Storm of Drones (1996), The Swarm of Drones (1995), and The Throne of Drones (1995). In 1997 Amacher received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship for her sound installation works. That same year she received the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica.