The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde is a stunning work that achieves the history it intended to write while also providing stimulating inspiration about sound and approaches to creating it.  Editor David W. Bernstein presents a series of articles that detail the history, occasionally repeating information but allowing a pluralistic set of viewpoints to emerge instead of a monohistory.  The second half of the book is comprised of interviews, first with the primary actors of the Center (Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, Bill Maginnis, Morton Subotnick and Tony Martin) and then with other figures who were also involved (Terry Riley, Ann Halprin, Don Buchla, Stewart Brand, Stuart Dempster).
 
 
(l-r: Ramon Sender, Michael Callahan, Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros (seated))

I think I found this particularly inspiring because I read this at a time when I've felt rather oversaturated with experimental music, and a bit unsure about how to continue my own experimentation in the field.  I'm about to embark on a stint with Lied Music/Vernon and Burns for the first time in ages, which makes me think a lot about the aesthetics of tape (which I haven't worked with since I left the UK -- I don't even own a working reel-to-reel at the moment).
 

This is an odd blog, being that I rarely post anything to it - recently I've had little to say apart from announcements or unstructured reflections on death or semi-liquid travel reports.  Well, here I go again: I'm writing something messy, belatedly, after the death of Maryanne Amacher.

It's easy to make statements like "it changed my life", etc. -- and I'm prone to hyperbole anyway -- but I never articulated my thoughts after I experienced Amacher's music and in retrospect, it really was some sort of turning point for me.



I saw her at the INSTAL festival in Glasgow, 2007, as the final act of a dense 3-day sound festival. I remember that I almost skipped it because someone spilled a beer on me right before she played and I was sticky and grumpy.  But I stuck around because for years I enjoyed the Tzadik disc Sound Characters (though I really only played it whenever I wanted to freak myself out [or irritate friends]). Some of the tracks had this insane effect on my head when turned up to a very loud volume -- and I knew that the CD format couldn't contain the frequencies that her live work conveyed.