Sonic Genealogies
crys cole on Annea Lockwood
Transcription
Sonic Genealogies
crys cole on Annea Lockwood
Hello, my name is crys cole and I am a sound artist, originally from Winnipeg, Canada, and currently based in Berlin, Germany. My practice takes various shapes and forms. I primarily create works for record, for playback. I also do a lot of live performance, which includes some improvisational elements on which I've worked extensively over the last two-plus decades.
And I also create works for exhibitions, for gallery installations and for site-specific locations. There is an interest in creating spaces, playing with depth of sound, playing with dimension of sound, juxtaposing very different acoustic spaces, for example close-miking versus something in a large, resonant space. I think I like the potential of, you could say, an aural surrealism. Exploring the way that we hear sounds and the way that our minds interpret and perceive those sounds. My materials are usually very simple, banal, domestic things or familiar sounds or my body... the very basic things, but that I find within them this incredibly intricate sound world that can be played with, based on how you record the space you recorded in, how you reflect sounds against each other and this kind of thing.
There's something particularly interesting to me about using very simple tools, very simple methods, in order to bring out something that becomes quite rich and unusual and complex and by focusing in on a sound and slowly opening it up, slowly showing the sort of depth and dimension of it; it has this incredible potential. I feel like sound has an absolutely immense potential to generate experience, to activate the imagination, to transport us, to give us these feelings that are almost, at times, impossible to put into words.
Today, I'll be speaking about composer and artist Annea Lockwood. Lockwood is an artist who is originally from New Zealand and by way of the UK and Germany and various other streams, she somehow found herself in the United States, which is where she is still currently based and working.
I had heard of Annea Lockwood in my late teens, in my early twenties, just through my own investigations into experimental music, avant-garde, contemporary music, and I had mainly just come across her name in association with other artists whose work I had come across more easily. I knew that she was associated with a lot of interesting innovators in the electronic experimental communities in the United States, such as the Sonic Arts Union, Pauline Oliveros I also knew that she had this other extension to her work that was more associated with Fluxus and interesting sort of art in actions. But through this time, I had never actually come across her work. It wasn't until I was in my mid-twenties; I was working at a record store in Vancouver, Canada, called Zula Records, and my boss had recently given me the authority to purchase records from people coming in to sell collections, and this person brought in a small box of records and I was flipping through and, you know, some nice things and nice things for the store… and all of a sudden I saw Annea Lockwood's Glass World and I immediately kind of felt this pang of excitement. And anyways, I purchased the collection for the store and immediately took the record and put it aside with every intention to convince my boss that I could, that he should sell it to me for a steal. And I, remarkably, was successful with this. I convinced him it was not anything anyone would be interested in besides myself and got to take it home a few days later.
This piece or, I should say, these pieces that were featured on Glass World were so single-minded, so clear and really quite radical. I felt an immediate kinship when I listened to the record because there was this very, like, microscopic focus on a single sound source.
The context for this album was a series of concerts that, in the end, Annea had conducted in London for glass of different types. So each recorded piece on the record is a study, if you will, of sort of activating, sending energy through these different types of glass. There were maybe panes of glass, small glass marbles, some are cracking glass, some is just resonating the glass… Different ways that you can, sort of, create sound through different types of glass. And just exploring this very, very clearly, letting the sounds unfold, letting the sounds exist if they resonate, letting them ring out. If they crash, letting that sound happen, exist, unfold and die. And this spoke to me very, very deeply as it was something I was already applying in my own work, really choosing single sources to study, single sources to investigate, and particularly also sounds that needed to be closely miked, contact-miked, highly amplified, in order to pick up all of these incredibly rich and complex tones. Typical sounds that existed, but only with the ability to microscopically enhance them.
It's interesting because at the time this was one of those very important, profound moments in my listening life. And I held it very, very dear. But it wasn't for a few more years that I really started to look deeper into her body of work. And I never would have expected that not only would her work become a much bigger part of my life, but that she herself would actually come into my life and become a friend and someone that I could correspond with and share things with and spend time with. So that was a really remarkable and wonderful aspect of that record coming into my life that I really hold dear. From the glass works I went next to one of the first recordings that Annea had in the world following the Glass World, which was a piece called “Tiger Balm” that was originally released on a split LP with Ruth Anderson that came out on Opus One.
This piece takes quite a different form than the Glass World, as it's more field recording based and essentially almost like an uncut piece, but only it has a completely different flow to it. I would say there's a very organic, slow opening through this piece, and one of the things that's particularly striking about it is that there's this sensuality that runs through this piece in the detail, in the sort of closeness of the sounds, in the depth of the sounds, the way they really do resonate through the body when you're listening to them. You'll hear field recordings of a cat purring, for example, or the sound of a woman potentially climaxing, and then natural sounds as well. And these things, although they interact with each other or they exist with each other, the way the piece is structured, you have this same focus of hearing a particular sound, and it has its time to sort of exist, to come into this space, to become very present with you before other sounds are introduced. There's not a lot of layering of sounds. Things may coexist at points. Things blur into each other, but there's this beautiful slowness to the way that these sounds evolve and relate to each other.
After this point, I started investigating some of her later works, the works that came after this period that were primarily written for instrumentalists, for ensembles. And I thought to myself: How does this relate? How does this relate to her earlier works, to these pieces that have this very clear focus and are often of non-traditional instrumentation? Here she is working with a pianist or working with a classically trained vocalist or a small ensemble that may incorporate a horn or electronics.
And at first I thought to myself: Oh, I don't know if it's going to be as compelling, probably just because foolishly I was thinking: well, I don't work with traditional instruments and I want to hear these more abstract sound sources that she works with so beautifully. But the more I spent time listening to these works, the more I realised that they were an absolutely natural extension of her process, of her way of listening, her way of composing. And that the same focus of exploring a sound, exploring a process, was so present through these works in the same way as it was if she were recording a river or if she were recording a pane of glass. And each piece gives you this, this process that you get to enter into where you slowly get to hear the temporal changes.
You hear the way the textures evolve; you hear the way the tones can shift and move. There's a complexity of detail that comes from the incredible focus that she has through listening, listening to a player, working with them, listening to a river, pulling out those sounds, concentrating on areas where certain sounds become more present. If she's working with, for example, a fantastic trumpet player like Nate Wooley, they sit in and he plays; they discuss, she listens, they talk about something that's happened.
They focus on that. You say: What if you push that further? What if you take that technique and you run with that a little bit as far as you can? What will happen? And this process is just this endless process of discovery, but it's based on a very, very, very incredibly focused listening and a slowness of process, a presence not unlike someone like Éliane Radigue, where there's this incredible focus on letting something happen and not pushing it too hard, letting it be, letting it exist, letting it evolve.
Although their work is quite different, I think there is a strong philosophical connection in the way that both Annea and Éliane listen and think about sound and compose. I also think the way that they work with instrumentalists and players to interpret their work is incredibly intimate and very much related as well. There's a relationship that's developed and these pieces come to life distinctly through these conversations, these communications, in order to express the unique detail and qualities that each composer is seeking in these works.
And that to me is a really interesting aspect of both of these contemporary composers. Works, you know, in something that I think is a really important thing to look into.
In 2017, I invited Annea Lockwood to be one of the “Guests of Honor” at a festival that I was running in Winnipeg called send + receive. I was curator and director of the send + receive festival for 12 years, and in 2017 it would have been my second-last year running the festival.
This was not the first time I had met Annea, but this was the first time I was able to bring her and spend so much time with her over the course of a week during the festival. And it was an absolute delight. And it also really enlightened me to the breadth of her work. And it was such a pleasure to spend so much time listening to all of these pieces spanning decades. There's a lot of inspiration that I took from just her continued dedication and evolution as an artist, as a woman artist. Where did this young woman have this gumption to travel around the world and do something really so radical? Talking to her about this over the years has been really interesting because I think at first she, sort of, was like, you know, it was just a time when people tried things and you didn't…
She felt quite free. She felt supported. She felt that she was in communities where there was a lot of support. But I couldn't shake that as a woman, it would have been quite different than if you were, you know, Alvin Lucier or Bob Ashley at this time where there's a camaraderie; there's a male camaraderie. If you're coming from the concrete community in France or you're exploring these things within these very male little bubbles, then it would have been quite different.
I think she's a free spirit who had a very strong will to believe in herself and try things out. And really I think people responded to that. But as she was established in the US and obviously had more and more female peers, I think there was more conversation about how women fit into the equation, how they were treated, how often their work was referenced.
These kinds of conversations led to women kind of coming together and saying, you know, actually, we're not getting the same opportunities; we're not being taken as seriously. And there's no reason for that. And how do we create these spaces for our work so that we can actually elevate each other and acknowledge, you know, that there is a very large group of female composers working their asses off and doing really interesting and really adventurous things, and it's not getting the focus it should.
I think having a friend like Pauline Oliveros… with whom she was very close and was a very important figure in her life, particularly as she introduced her to Ruth Anderson, who became Annea’s wife and partner for over 50 years. Pauline obviously was also having these revelations and thinking about these things more during this period and starting to write about it and starting to speak out about it. You know, “And Don't Call Them 'Lady' Composers” was one of Pauline's articles that she wrote specifically addressing this issue.
One very clear project that Annea was a part of that illustrates this conversation taking place within her community was a project called Womens Work that she co-edited with Fluxus artist Alison Knowles in 1975. And this project was the two of them inviting female artists in their community, working within sound, music, visual arts, dance to create scores. And these scores were then going to be published together as this official document showing the incredible community of women artists that were actively contributing to the arts community at that point in time. And this would serve as a resource for continued interpretation and presentation of these scores indefinitely.
A couple of years ago, I was invited by ISSUE Project Room in New York. They did a project called With Womens Work, where they invited a group of, I think, 14 of us female-identifying artists and non-binary artists to select pieces from the book, from the original zine to reinterpret. And I selected a work by Beth Anderson, an American composer who did this absolutely gorgeous piece of typography of r’s. And when I saw it… one, its visually… it's beautiful, it's impactful, it's got this lovely collage look to it. But it immediately put the sound of rolling r’s in my head, which opened up a whole array of ideas that led to my piece, which I retitled. The best piece is called “Valid For Life”, and I, riffing on it and playing with her ideas and pushing it further into my own non-instrumental category, changed the title to “Valid ForeverrRrrRRrrr…” with many, many r’s at the end.
And once again I had the opportunity to sit and have a conversation with Annea and with Irene Revell, a wonderful curator, about the project and about our work and about the relationship between Annea and my work. And I think it's really important that these kinds of conversations continue to take place for people to engage with and participate in what it means to be a woman artist or a female-identifying artist or a non-binary artist in this day and age and what it meant to be a woman artist working in the past.
And, you know, these conversations are constantly evolving and changing, especially as the conversations around gender are evolving and growing and changing. And it's really integral that these conversations continue because the fact is: there have been a lot of incredibly important female artists working in the twentieth century, contributing tremendously to the future of sound and experimental music and avant-garde music and contemporary music.
And they were not given the focus. They were not the ones who had the spotlight shone on them. And it's time that we start understanding and learning more about their work. And also the exchange between younger artists and older artists is always so enriching and so valuable. And so for younger women and female-identifying artists to be able to communicate and learn from these predecessors who have been paving the way, who have been through this process, is so incredibly valuable and important to continuing to write these stories.
Perhaps now is a good moment to mention, again, Ruth Anderson, whom I briefly mentioned previously, as she is an incredibly important figure in the history of Annea Lockwood… and the primary reason that Annea ended up relocating to America and living in the US, where she still is based. Ruth Anderson was an American composer who worked both with orchestral and electronic music, and she played a very important role in establishing an electronic music studio at Hunter College in New York.
And this to me is a really important part of her legacy and also an incredible connection to Annea, which is how they were to come to meet at the time. Annea had been reached out by Pauline Oliveros, who was a mutual friend of both composers, and she had said, “oh, would you be interested in taking over and running this studio while Ruth is on sabbatical?”.
And Annea jumped at the opportunity to come and spend time in the US and take on this role for a period of time. And little did she know she was about to meet the person she would spend the rest of her life with. This relationship, I think, is a really integral part of Annea’s story and a creative collaboration, a love collaboration, a life collaboration that is an incredibly integral part of her life and her life as an artist. Unfortunately, Ruth Anderson passed away in 2019 and just before that her and Annea had been excavating her archives and were able to put together this absolutely beautiful record that came out after Ruth's passing, unfortunately, on Arc Light Editions.
And from this point, after Ruth passed away, Annea also discovered these pieces that Ruth had written to her essentially like audio love letters. One of the first ones that Ruth had ever sent to her is this gorgeous piece of tape music, but also it's just loaded with all of this incredible energy. And you can feel the intimacy, you can feel the excitement, you can feel all of this wonderful human energy coursing through this piece and Annea made a sort of response piece to it, an ode to Ruth after Ruth was no longer with us. And these pieces are being released on a record called Tête-à-tête.
And this is something that I'm interested in exploring in my own work as well. I tend to pull from my life, into my work, not always in a way that's very obvious. In fact, most of the time I think it's personal to me, but it's not necessarily something that could be perceived as autobiographical to the listener. But a lot of the sound sources that I bring into my work through field recordings or even through passages that I write or that I create for a larger composition come from sounds that I'm hearing around me in my domestic environment, trips that I'm on, things that have a personal impact to me, something that moves me, something that I want to remember.
And in a more overt case, you could say, or overt example, is also my collaboration with my partner Oren Ambarchi. And I think from the beginning of our creative collaboration, which coincided with our romantic collaboration, we began to bring aspects of our personal life, our relationship, our travels, our domesticity into the records that we've created together.
So there's always an aspect of, sort of, almost a journal of our life, a journal of things in our relationship, of periods in our life together directly, sometimes more clear, sometimes more obscured. To me it’s a fascinating realm to create from as it makes you think about… you pull things out that you wouldn't necessarily consider working with in another context.
And in that process, you have all of this discovery, you kind of chart uncharted territories; you're building a new map for yourself and this process is really enriching. And doing that with my partner has been really fascinating. And also even in my own work, that form of taking from my day-to-day life and bringing it into a piece is to me a really interesting process of self-reflection and also redefinition. So yeah, it's something that I find interesting, and I think with this project, particularly with Annea and Ruth, it’s definitely something I think is really special and dear.
I really feel that Annea Lockwood's work is sort of like an endlessly deep well that you can constantly go back to and discover something in. There is such a unique and really important focus on listening that you hear in her work.
There is a value that she puts on each sound that is so integral to the richness, to the depth, to the flow of her music. This is music meant to be focused on. This is music that you enter and that you spend time in and that washes over you and that you become a part of. And to me, that's the kind of music that I want to make. That's the kind of music that I love. Music that sort of… yeah, that becomes a part of you, that you can exist within and that transports you. And I feel like she has this incredible openness and generosity, not just as a person, as a teacher, as a peer, as a collaborator. She's a remarkable human being. But I think there's a generosity in her music that as a listener and as a creator, especially for young composers and people entering these fields, there is something that just is very pure and very open in her work that many of us could learn from.
It's not dissimilar to that quality of Pauline Oliveros’s work with the deep listening, but it manifests itself quite differently. And I think that, yeah, I feel that the more her work is engaged with, the more people research it, the more people spend time interpreting these pieces, the more people sit and listen to conversations that she's had. There's so many wonderful podcasts and interviews with her in recent years, and I'm so thrilled that the interest in her work is becoming more and more. It just seems to be growing on a regular basis and it's so well-deserved. This is someone who has been treading her own path from day one and has explored so many different methodologies to express the same ideas through her work. And I feel that, yeah, there's a rich library of music and compositions and ideas that we can all benefit from spending some time with. I think we're very lucky to have her.
The aim of the Sonic Genealogies series is to listen to the work of some of the most eminent figures in experimental music and sound art in the 20th century. However, it seeks to do so in a unique way: through the ears and voices of those artists who have retaken certain aspects of its sound legacy and melded them in some way into their own creations. Consequently, the idea is to put into practice this beautiful idea of “sharing listening” which Peter Szendy puts forward in the pages of his book Listen: A History of our Ears.
In each episode in the series, a different artist will “lend their listening” to engage us with it. The ideas and reflections of the artists interviewed, mixed with fragments taken from the sound world of the leading artists in each podcast, will reveal how the ideas and sounds of their predecessors “endure” or “resound” in their own work. Through the idea of “borrowed listening” they track, in part at least, their sound genealogies.
Some of the leading musicians and composers from the Sonic Genealogies series are still working today, while only the work of others involved remains: the forever living echo in their work and their understanding of sound. Moreover, many of the artists lending their ears and voices have collaborated, at some point, with the figures they will be discussing, and in these instances genealogy does not seem to run along one line or in one sole direction, but instead appears submerged in a kind of resonance between two generations. Listening to this resonance is the aim of this series.
Arnau Horta holds a PhD in philosophy and he is an independent curator and researcher specialised in the sphere of contemporary sound creation. He has collaborated with MACBA, the Loop Festival, Sónar, Caixafòrum, the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB), the Catalonia Film Institute and La Casa Encendida, among other centres and cultural initiatives. As a teacher and spokesperson he has worked with the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the University of Barcelona, the Institut d'Humanitats of Barcelona and with the IED and ESDI schools, and is a collaborator in "Cultura/s" (La Vanguardia), "Babelia" (El País) and Ahora Semanal. He is currently working on his PhD in philosophy.
Share
- Date:
- 16/05/2024
- Production:
- Arnau Horta
- License:
- Creative Commons by-nc-nd 4.0
Audio quotes
- Annea Lockwood. “World Rhythms” from Sinopah. XI Records (1998)