Maryanne Amacher: Intelligent Life vinyl record

Maryanne Amacher: Intelligent Life vinyl recordHad it been produced, Maryanne Amachers media opera Intelligent Life would have represented the summation of the composers concept to date. As she wrote to John Cage in the autumn of 1983, following the untimely deaths of the operas patronsWies Smals, founder of De Appel, and curator Josine van Droffelaar, in a plane crash in the Swiss Alpsshe would have at last had the support to communicate the finest of my thought to others. Amachers serial,

from the outhouse of a New Orleans juke joint to the land of Oo-bla-dee

vile ambience

New York in front of a live audience at the Creative Music Studio (the improvised music nonprofit founded by Karl Berger

the Believer

creative intelligence

weaving the instrument’s woodsy interlocking melodies with angelic Yamaha CS-80 synth sweeps and stuttering glitches

alongside Stanley Lunetta

cover art (depicting an audience of cats and mice at the Leas Club

As part of his liner notes for the original records (newly translated for this edition)

medical technology

FAVN and its resynthesis point back to Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1876 poem “L’Après-Midi d’un Faun

” Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers’ disco breakup anthem