At some point in their lives, everybody wants to live in New York City. When I picture it now, all I see is the crowds and the filth and the death in the streets-- in other words, a larger, more intense version of my present neighborhood in San Francisco. Fuhgedaboudit, they said across the river in Jersey. But as a young man, I had crazy black- and- white visions of the Big Apple skyline, of walking through Central Park trying to explain contemporary music to Woody Allen, of shooting hoops with Thurston Moore in Thompkins square, of eating Hot Dogs with Jim Carroll at Yankee Stadium. It certainly is a hell of a town.

New York is where experimental sound artist Maryanne Amacher has presented the bulk of her work over the last twenty- five years, and hearing what she's up to now rekindles my NYC dreams. Amacher's known for creating installations so extreme and all- encompassing that the idea of trying to record the sonic mayhem to two- track stereo is akin to taking a snapshot of the Grand Canyon. In other words, while one may get the general idea from the reproduction, it in no way replicates the intensity of the original experience. And so she has not recorded her work, save a couple of scattered compilation tracks. Until now.

Sound Characters contains excerpts from some of Amacher's installations as well as pieces composed specifically for the album. Three tracks explore what Amacher calls "third ear music," wherein high- pitched tones are structured to resonate inside the listener's skull so that the person's inner ear vibrates, creating "new" music distinct from that emanating from the speakers. Sound crazy? I was skeptical, too, but if you crank up "Head Rhythm 1" loud enough, there's no denying that something is going on. As oddly arranged sine-wave tones in the 2,000 Hz range bounce between the speakers, your ears start to itch, you begin to feel funny, and it becomes unclear exactly where the music is coming from. The effect supposedly works best at high volume, but I was unable to test this due to the whimpers of my poor cat, Otis. He wasn't digging "Head Rhythm 1" at all, and I gave in to his cries.

The best tracks on Sound Characters are not the bizarre (and potentially grating) "ear dances," but the rich, resonant bass works that comprise the bulk of the album. Many of these pieces are flat-out terrifying, in that they make you feel small and feeble in the face of their power. All of them are difficult to describe. "Synaptic Island" sounds something like a monolithic steel dinosaur being dragged kicking and screaming through an airplane hangar as horrible electrical storms rage overhead. "Tower" has deep, textured bass tones that people with pacemakers should probably listen to on headphones or avoid altogether. "VM2" consists of a gorgeous, 17- minute drone, the last seven minutes of which is an almost imperceptible fade- out which strives to create an aural "after image." Maryanne Amacher creates music that makes DJ Spooky seem as experimental as DJ Rick Dees. Pick up Sound Characters, tough guy. If you've got the guts.

-Mark Richard-San