Continuing their longstanding and deeply important dedication to the work and legacy of Maryanne Amacher, the publishing arm of Blank Forms returns to action with the first ever publication attending to her unrealized, early 1980s sci-fi television and radio “Media Opera”. Distinct from what we have largely come to expect from the composer and artist, while simultaneously revealing about her ideas, optimism, and imagined practice. Across nearly 500 pages, comprising texts, treatments, storyboards, and images, we encounter an artist who perceived the coming of AI and its impact on music and the arts, and proposed a radically experimental approach to sound that feels remarkably prescient today, pointing toward a future that has yet to fully unfold.

The expectation that an artist might be ahead of their time - presenting an understanding or worldview at odds with our own, anticipating aspects of the future yet to be widely perceived - has become written into our notion of creative greatness. Within the avant-garde - a radical creative position that emerged to propel 20th Century Modernism’s forward march - it is a defining characteristic, often resulting in what the critic and poet, René Ricard, referred to as "Van Gogh effect”: an artist being so ahead of their time that they cannot be fully understood or appreciated within it. Among the most noteworthy cases of this within avant-garde sound practice and experimental music is American composer and artist Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009). Over the course of her career, beginning during the 1960s, Amacher created some of the most singularly forward-thinking work in the field, making revolutionary statements connected to the perception and experience of sonic phenomena. Despite being highly regarded among her peers and celebrated by a small circle of dedicated fans, Amacher lingered in relative obscurity for much of her career, in part because of the site-specificity of much of her work, and the difficulty in getting it produced. At the time of her death, only two commercial audio releases had distributed her ideas to audiences beyond these limits. Thankfully, over the last decade or so, the New York based publisher, curatorial platform, and record label, Blank Forms, has offered considerable effort to elevating Amacher’s efforts and legacy to the level that they’ve always deserved, staging talks, listening sessions, and concerts, as well as releasing ‘Petra’ - her first commercially available instrumental work - and publishing ‘Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews’, an astounding volume of essential and illuminating texts. Adding to this list of accomplishments is Blank Forms’ latest, the first ever publication of Amacher’s ‘Intelligent Life’, a mind-warping volume collecting all of the material connected to her unrealized “Media Opera, designed for Television and Stereo FM Sound Simulcast. A musical “occurring in the Future,” to be presented as a Multi-Part Series”, which she described to John Cage in the autumn of 1983 as the vehicle through which to “communicate the finest of my thought to others.” Almost Orwellian in its futuristic envisioning of realities that currently unfold around us in the present, this engrossing work illuminates Amacher’s singular belief in the power and importance of experimental relationships to sound to reassert and experience our own humanity in ways that not only lend understanding to the past, but also how we might move forward toward a better version of our futures.

Maryanne Amacher was a titan in 20th century experimental composition and sound practice, who pioneered the field that engages directly with psychoacoustic phenomena, largely creating a body of work that addressed, and resided within, the specificities of time, location, and space. A student of George Rochberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and numerous others, before her graduate work in the then emerging fields of acoustics and computer science, early in her career Amacher regularly collaborated with many of the 20th century musical avant-garde’s most noted names - John Cage, Max Neuhaus, Merce Cunningham, etc. - but increasingly delved toward highly distinct realms that were almost entirely her own, notably the sonic telepresence series, "City Links 1-22" (1967-); the architecturally staged "Music for Sound-Joined Rooms" (1980-); and the "Mini-Sound Series" (1985-).

Amacher worked extensively with psychoacoustic phenomena known as 'auditory distortion products’: secondary sounds generated inside of the ear, that are usually triggered by a primary sound source, most commonly known by the name of 'combination tones', 'difference tones', and 'Tartini tones’, which Amacher herself termed as 'ear tones' and 'otoacoustic emissions’. She is widely regarded as the first artist to systematically explore the musical use of these phenomena using electroacoustic sound technologies, while also, toward the end of her career, beginning to explore their possibilities when composing for acoustic instruments, as was the case with works like ‘Petra’, issued by Blank Forms back in 2019. Fascinatingly, in narrative form - a very different means of expression than the first hand phenomena she is known for presenting her listeners - ‘Intelligent Life’ addresses many of these same themes and illuminates their potential importance and potency within our lives.

Growing out of a number of related and unrelated projects that were developed and staged during the 1970s, Amacher conceived ‘Intelligent Life’ as a “Media Opera, designed for Television and Stereo FM Sound Simulcast.” Roughly contemporaneous with Robert Ashley’s ‘Perfect Lives’, the conceptualization of the work almost entirely occupied the entirety of the composer’s efforts and focus during the early years of the 1980s, resulting in hundreds of pages of treatments and text, before its ultimate realization was seemingly scuppered by the untimely deaths of the opera’s patrons - Wies Smals, founder of De Appel, and curator Josine van Droffelaar - in a plane crash in the Swiss Alps, in 1983. While perceptively distinct from the site-specific work, addressing sonic phenomena, for which Amacher has most widely become known, ‘Intelligent Life’ offers a unique lens into the many layers of her thinking and interests, not the least of which being her interest in science fiction, her complex relationship to technology and media, and her desire to harness modes of transmission as a means to distribute sonic experience within new conceptions of site-specificity. As Blank Forms’ Lawrence Kumpf illuminates in his introduction to the volume: “Set in the year 2021, Intelligent Life follows the employees of Supreme Connections, Inc., a music entertainment corporation navigating a future in which artificial intelligence generates music faster than composers can. Anticipating an industry-wide downturn, Supreme Connections president Aplisa Kandel seeks advanced technologies that will revolutionize the act of listening and the future of music, including a bio-music script that lets the user hear Bach from the aural perspective of a reindeer and a wearable device that goes beyond replicating the mechanical tympanic resonances of the listening subject to produce the “listening mind” or the “sophisticated perceiver” - capturing and reproducing all the emotional and psychological associations unique to each individual”, stating, “had it been produced, Maryanne Amacher’s media opera Intelligent Life would have represented the summation of the composer’s concept to date.” Delving into the book’s roughly 500 pages of material generated by her for the ultimately unrealized project - episodic scripts; technical notes on audiovisual setup, broadcast media, and LaserDisc; and a fully illustrated storyboard for the pilot episode - it’s hard to argue with Kumpf. What we have access to, and thus can imagine through this material, gives a striking presentation of what might have been.

While we can’t experience ‘Intelligent Life’ as Amacher might have hoped, the anthologizing of its material manages to reframe it in a way that transmits its most important elements: the work’s singular thinking and ideas. Not only is it engrossing on its own terms, perhaps more than any other of the composer and artist’s works, it guides toward a clear understanding of her profound optimism relating to the capacity of sound and music upon our lives, and her deep desire to move these ideas into the mass media realm. Most strikingly, it displays Amacher as a thinker far ahead of her time, anticipating the dangers of artificial intelligence that almost no one could have perceived during the early 1980s, and are only just beginning to enter our consciousness more than 40 years later. In imagining such a world, she offers a moving and apt proposal through which our contemporary reality might move forward and adapt to these emerging challenges: doing the very thing that the musical avant-garde has always attempted to do. Nothing short of engrossing and amazing, leaving us with plenty to think about, once again Blank Forms has done the legacy of Maryanne Amacher a great service with the long overdue and much needed publication of ‘Intelligent Life’. Complemented by an in-depth essay introducing and exploring the work and its background, immediate context, and ideas by Lawrence Kumpf, this incredible, nearly 500-page book - beautifully produced, reproducing Amacher’s hand-typed treatments and corresponding images and drawings on colored paper - takes remarkably important steps toward expanding our understanding of her efforts and the spirit behind them.