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back in stock as of
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sound-art
experimental-instruments
1970s-electronic
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electro-acoustic-composition
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| | | em (japan) #em 1064 cd annea lockwood “early works 1967-1982” compact disc - micro glass shaken (1:43)
- glass rod vibrating (1:50)
- turning gong (1:29)
- mini mobile (2:12)
- wine glass (1:46)
- water gong (5:52)
- two ribbed discs (1:56)
- rod across edge of pane (2:10)
- glass bulb (0:50)
- glissandi (0:25)
- spinning discs (1:49)
- dialogue: bottles & jars (1:44)
- vibrating pane (2:03)
- bubbling (1:44)
- breathing machine (2:34)
- water jars (1:34)
- rod roll (1:06)
- micro glass on goblet (1:06)
- micro glass along pane (1:24)
- cullet: two glass rocks (1:35)
- medium mobile (2:33)
- bottle tree showered with fragments (0:46)
- deep water gong (4:16)
- tiger balm (18:52) 1970
| june 2007 release - em’s reissue of annea lockwood’s awesome 1970 u.k. tangent (whom also released the henri chopin “audiopoems” lp and spontaneous music ensemble’s “the source from and towards”) lp “the glass world”, with the 1970 tape-piece “tiger balm,” originally released on a 10” record accompanying issue nr. 9 of source magazine, here making its debut on cd as a bonus track...
“the glass world” consists of nothing more/less than ms. lockwood improvising, harry bertoia-style, on a series of glass instruments; a catalogue of sorts ranging from placid, enharmonic drones to clanging gamelan/gong-like sonorities and gravity-derived rhythm sets.
“tiger balm”, composed at london’s ems (electronic music studios - yes, the same that birthed the vcs3/synthi) utilizes sounds ranging from cat purrs (echoing, in my mind, terry fox’s later “the labyrinth scored for the purrs of 11 different cats”), looping dissonant vibraphone/gamelan and heartbeat figures, concrète noises and, at one spot, strands of orgasmic female moaning dovetailed with the growls of a (presumably) female tiger...
the disc comes with two booklets; one with liners for “the glass world” and “tiger balm” (in japanese and english), plus another documenting lockwood’s “piano transplants (1967-82)” (16-pages; also in japanese and english.) an essential sound-art document. |
| | annea lockwood
early works 1967-1982
two single booklets:
one for cd liners, another for piano transplants.
*cardboard special cd case
*liner notes & scores
*english/japanese texts.
*many scarce photos.
liner notes written by:
annea lockwood
ems original selection of her early works which had once featured on source: music of the avant garde, you know its now legend magazine for new & experimental music in 1967-1973.
(* source featuring artists were all important new music creators incl. cage / tudor / ichiyanagi / rosenboom / mev / chopin / ems studio / riley / neuhaus & more & more !) .
this cd incl. the album glass world (originally issued on tangent records in england, 1970), and trippy ritual shamanic tape piece tiger balm (1970). also her most notable works, series performances piano transplants (1967-82) is now re-realized on one single special booklet, containing piano burning, piano garden etc....
***********************************
annea lockwood was born in christchurch, new zealand in 1939 and lived in london and cologne from 1961 - 1972, studying at the royal college of music and the musikhochschule, koln, and freelancing as a composer-performer. since 1973 she has lived in peekskill, new york, and taught on the faculty of music at vassar college, new york from 1982 - 2001. her music has been presented in north america, britain, france, germany, austria, the netherlands, scandinavia, italy, belgium, mexico, australia and new zealand.
...
when the editors of source, music of the avant-garde contacted me in 1969 i was living in london, working in the experimental music scene as a composer-performer. in 1963-4, i was in cologne, studying electronic music with gottfried michael koenig - a superb teacher and early computer-music composer. when i returned to london an old friend, composer hugh davies, put me in touch with bob cobbing, a sound poet with whom i performed and worked on several tape pieces (klowkukulan, soleil etc). through bob and hugh, i met, amongst many other artists, the french sound poet and publisher henri chopin, for whose magazine, ou (number 37, 1970) i made one hundred sound hats - simple skeletal hat brims from which dangled small sound-makers: pieces of bamboo, table tennis balls, plastic discs - whose soft sounds were audible only to the wearer. in accord with the times, the hats were topped with an incense stick. i also worked with a contemporary dance company, strider, and its choreographer, richard alston, who choreographed tiger balm for the london contemporary dance theatre in 1972, and toured with it. his dancers were naked beneath gauzy transparent costumes, which looked elegant but ensured that the dance was not presented in south america, after its first performance in brazil.
the arts council of great britain and the gulbenkian foundation, among others, were steadily supportive of the contemporary music community, but in fact it was possible to realise many projects with minimal funding, which was an important freedom. and, equally important, we found that we could work and move in as many different directions as we wanted, unconstrained by the need to follow a particular 'school' or establish a particular style. during this time i developed two guiding principles which served me well for a long time: always say 'yes!' and when considering which idea to work on next, choose the most extreme. i made participatory sound installations; experimented with sonic clothing in shone (ca. 1971); played in an improvisation group called naked software with hugh davies and others, and above all, developed the glass concert, an immersion in pure sound which transformed my musical being.
source magazine was truly a source for many of us, and was very important for me, placing me in contact with the musicians and ideas i felt closest to, so that when i moved to the united states in 1973, i felt that i already had roots here. in 1970, for example, source introduced me to pauline oliveros' sonic meditations. we started an extended correspondence because we were both thinking about how sound affects the body, about being women composers in a still-male world. we exchanged scores and performances, and then through pauline and the electronic music composer, now my partner, ruth anderson, i was invited to teach in the us.
it has been a generous, invigorating environment in which to work and live, and it started me moving in new directions. during the 1970s and '80s i took my fascination with environmental sounds much further, in works such as world rhythms (1975, for ten channels of natural sounds ranging from earthquakes to tree frogs), and the installation - a sound map of the hudson (1982), which traces the course of that river through its sounds. i became interested in life-narratives. delta run (1982, tape and extremely slow movement) came after i had received a great gift, the chance to be with my mother when she died. eight years later i met with a dying sculptor, walter wincha, who wanted a way to continue his work through the medium of his own body, by describing his feelings about dying to others. his voice, wind and other natural sounds merge into this final ‘run’.
many of these were works i performed myself, but in 1987 i was asked to write a piano piece, red mesa, and started to work with thomas buckner, a fine baritone and presenter of new music. i became excited again about working with acoustic instruments and the voice, resources i had not touched since the mid-1960s. things circle back: thomas buckner's vocal improvisations reminded me of the shamanic voices i had heard in the bbc sound archives in the' 60s, so we created duende (1998, tape and voice) in which he gradually moves into a heightened state through the medium of his own voice. in ceci n'est pas un piano (2002, piano, elecronics, video), images from the piano transplant installations float behind pianist jennifer hymer, and her voice is transduced through the piano strings. in 2006 i was commissioned to compose a score for merce cunningham's dance, eyespace. this gave me a most welcome opportunity to work with takehisa kosugi, whose creativity with electronics has been an inspiration since i first heard him and the taj mahal travelers at the ices festival in london, 1972.
the glass world album
glass world is based upon a live performance, the class concert, which i worked on from 1967 to 1970 and which i performed first at middle earth, london, in 1968. i gave seventy -six performances of this staged work, internationally, between 1968 and 1973. source magazine published the score in issue 5, 1969. the following is a description which i wrote for a magazine article at that time:
performances last approximately two hours. sounds are presented as single events, separated by silences. this succession of sounds is broken from time to time by light pieces [designed by harvey matusow, who also performed some sounds with me] - intensely colored spot lighting is projected onto three large structures onstage: curtains of fine glass tubing; trees of bottles inverted in a spiral pattern; a mobile of large panes of wired glass, surrounded by mirrors. when one of these structures is used for a sound event, light and sound come together. all other sounds, however, are made off-stage, amplified, and projected into a totally dark theatre in the effort to focus people totally on the sound - now!
michael steyn, the producer of tangent records, came to one of the middle earth performances, and was intrigued by this unfamiliar sound world. in 1968 we started recording in a church, using neumanns, akgs and a nagra in late night sessions to avoid ambient noise. it took us two years because i kept discovering new sounds in performances. "one of the most serene and illuminating records of the avant garde" wrote john fordham in time out, london 1973.
i loved the unpredictability of glass - the need to be absolutely in the moment so that i could hear every detail, which movements encouraged the glass to sing, and when to let it take over. i thought of each sound as having its own life and natural span. "i have treated each sound as if it were a piece of music in itself. for me, every sound has its own minute form - is composed of small flashing rhythms, shifting tones, has momentum, comes, vanishes, lives out its own structure. and since we are used to hearing sounds together, either juxtaposed or compared, one sound alone seems simple - but so are the round scuffed stones lying about everywhere, until you crack one open and all its intricate beauty takes you by surprise." (original liner notes)
i had started exploring glass sounds as a way of sensitising my ears to very fine sonic detail. but the glass gave me a greater gift: it completely changed my way of composing and of thinking about music itself.
tiger balm
in 1970 i created a series of programs of trance and ritual music for the bbc, drawn from their huge collection of music recorded over many years from all over the world, the sound archives. i was concerned with how our bodies respond to sound, and with the concept of sound as a primal energy and nutrient, so the role of music in inducing trance states was of great interest; and of course altered states were a cultural preoccupation then. working on these programmes made me aware of how ritual seemed absent from my own culture, so tiger balm: a sound ritual was originally created as a music theatre piece incorporating live and taped sounds, and actions evocative of ritual. it seemed possible to me that traces of ancient rituals might still survive in communal memory - dormant traces perhaps, which could be evoked by sound.
that first version was published in source magazine, issue 9, 1971. the score reads: dark hall, or outdoors / fragments of ancient rituals / palm leaves or bamboo leaves sweeping through the air and across the ground/players blowing through grass blades/bare feet run on and on over dusty ground/ cool padding runner, padding sound/tiger purring tape/live, deep, calm breathing spreads out. you might imagine hearing these sounds in your space, as you listen.
for two years i assembled sounds which were erotic, sensuous, and then let the shape of the work emerge on a wholly intuitive level, sometimes literally dreaming of the structure at night. the sounds flow in a transformational process, often merging and emerging based on shared characteristics which are evocative of the tiger's presence - cat, mouth harp, tiger, woman, plane; all variants of the same sonic energy. a tiger has long been a magnetic symbol to me, and later i learned that it represents the female essence in chinese tradition. "the piece is part of my blending with myself as a woman - making love with one’s essence, merging with it." i realised several years later. |
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