Sinopah

Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson - Sinopah

Released in 1998 by the Experimental Intermedia Foundation, Sinopah features two long pieces by Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson respectively.The first piece, Annea Lockwoood's 'World Rhythms', originated as a 10-channel live improvisation, first performed in 1975. The version on the CD was recorded in 1997. In constructing this piece, Lockwood used recordings of natural events such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, rivers, waves and mud pools. As she explains in her liner notes, 'these sounds are a physical manifestation of energies which shape us and our environment constantly, energies of which we are not always aware, but which powerfully influence and interact with the rhythms of our bodies.' The result is a intriguing collage of sounds from massive natural events, peppered by the more local sounding of a gong, or the tapping of a pulsar. Lockwood's piece presents rhythms on a number of levels; some are more local and apparent, but I think the piece points more toward the rhythms of the world as a whole (bringing us back to the theory of the world as a living organism in and of itself), and as such there is a more large scale rhythm at play here, not immediately apparent to our senses as would be a more conventional rhythmic structure, requiring us to take a step back and look at the structure of the piece as a whole.
Ruth Anderson's 'I come out of your sleep' is a piece following in the traditions of sound poetry, or text-sound. The piece is based on the speech vowels in Louise Bogan's poem 'Little Lobelia'. The sounds appear in quiet whispers, elongated echoes, weaving in and out of the threshold of hearing like the sound of the wind against the trees. The whispered vowels become mysterious and tranquil tones. Although they have their origins in the words of a poem, these sounds do not form words in themselves (rather they are the vowels extracted from the poem), however the sounds seem to suggest a meaning or a message; the experience of listening is analogous to those moments when you swear you can hear words being spoken through the whispering winds. 'The breath rhythm is an invitation to meditation,' writes Pauline Oliveros in the liner notes; and further, 'the focus of meditation could be the poem, could be the breath, could be the sound, could be the non-threatening nature of the piece as a whole.' A mysterious and captivating work. (Richard di Santo, Incursion.org)

Tracklisting:

1. Annea Lockwood - World Rhythms {45:59}

2. Ruth Anderson - I come out of your sleep {23:32}

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Thousand Year Dreaming

Annea Lockwood - Thousand Year Dreaming

* originally posted on December 26, 2006

Thousand Year Dreaming was inspired by the Paleolithic cave paintings discovered in Lascaux, France. Lockwood mentions in the liner notes of this recording that these cave paintings are somehow connected with the resonant pulsing of the didjeridu. She believes the didjeridu is comparable to the sound of the Earth's core pulsing and that it is an expression of the life force. The piece was written mainly with didjeridus, blown conch shells, and percussion with other instruments added to the mix.

Musicians:

Art Baron - conch shell, trombone, didjeridu

Libby Van Cleve - oboe, english horn

Jon Gibson - didjeridu

Annea Lockwood - voice

J.D. Parran - clarinet, contrabass clarinet

Michael Pugliese - tam-tam, clapping sticks

Scott Robinson - conch shell, frame drums, pod rattle, tam-tam, superball harmonics

John Snyder - didjeridu, waterphone

Charles Wood - tam-tam, stones

Peter Zummo - trombone, didjeridu

Annea Lockwood was born in 1939 in Christchurch, New Zealand where she received her early training as a composer. She did graduate studies in composition at the Royal College of Music in London, the Darmstadt Ferienkurs fur Neue Musik, the Musikhochschule, Cologne, Germany and in Holland. Returning to London in 1964, she freelanced as a composer-performer in Britain and other European countries until moving to the USA in 1973. There she continued to free-lance and teach and is now on the faculty of Vassar College, NY.

During the 1960s she collaborated frequently with sound-poets, choreographers and visual artists, and created a number of works which she herself performed, such as the Glass Concert (1967), later published in Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, and recorded on Tangent Records, then on What Next CDs. In this work a variety of complex sounds were drawn from industrial glass shards and glass tubing, and presented as an audio-visual theater piece. In synchronous homage to Christian Barnard’s pioneering heart transplants, Lockwood created the Piano TranspIants (1969-72), in which old, defunct pianos were variously burned, “drowned” in a shallow pond in Amarillo, Texas, and partially buried in an English garden.During the 1970s and ’80s she turned her attention to performance works focused on environmental sounds, life-narratives and performance works using low-tech devices such as her Sound Ball (a foam-covered ball containing 6 small speakers and a radio receiver, originally designed to “put sound into the hands of” dancers). World Rhythms (l975), Conversations with the Ancestors (1979, based on the life stories of four women over 80), A Sound Map of the Hudson River (l982), Delta Run (1982, built around a conversation she recorded with the sculptor Walter Wincha, who was close to death), and the surreal Three Short Stories and an Apotheosis (l985, using the Sound Ball) were widely presented in the US, Europe and in New Zealand.

She turned to writing for acoustic instruments and voices, sometimes incorporating electronics and visual elements, in the 1990s. Thousand Year Dreaming (1991) is scored for four didgeridus and other instruments and incorporates slides of the cave paintings at Lascaux; Ear-Walking Woman(1996), for pianist Lois Svard, invites the pianist to discover a range of sounds available inside the instrument, using rocks, bubble-wrap, bowl gongs and other implements. (bio somewhere on the net)

Tracklisting:

1. Thousand Year Dreaming {42:58}

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