Wednesday, April 12th at 8pm ET, join ISSUE and Ergot Records for a listening event in celebration of the release of Tête-à-tête, a new LP of tape pieces by composers Annea Lockwood & the late Ruth Anderson, released by Ergot Records. The event will feature drinks, an introduction from Annea Lockwood, an audio diffusion of the record, and a DJ set from Ergot Records’ Adrian Rew, who will be playing LPs from Annea and Ruth’s collection. The event is hosted at The Poetry Project’s St. Mark’s Church space in the East Village, New York.
Over the course of a nearly 50 year romantic and creative partnership Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson have shared space on a number of significant releases of early electronic and tape music, including Charles Amirkhanian’s trailblazing 1977 anthology of women electronic composers New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, a 1981 split LP on Opus One, a 1997 CD for Phill Niblock’s XI imprint, and 1998’s Lesbian American Composers compilation on CRI. The couple additionally taught a course on the history of women’s music-making, at Hunter College, called Living Women, Living Music. Throughout their time together, they co-authored a number of Hearing Studies designed for people with no formal musical training, which were collected for a 2021 publication by Open Space Music. They spent most of their private life between Crompond, NY and the house they built themselves at Flathead Lake, Montana. Although Ruth passed away in 2019, the composers’ dialogue continues today with this collection of unreleased archival and new material.
Annea Lockwood has a deep history with ISSUE Project Room, is a member of the organization's Artistic Advisory Council, and was the honoree of ISSUE's 2021 Benefit. In 2021, ISSUE presented an online staging of her iconic Piano Transplants. At that time, ISSUE also commissioned Savannah Harris to create “With Inner Sound, Truth” taking cues from Ruth Anderson’s composition Silent sound (1976-77), published in Womens Work. This commission formed part of With Womens Work, an online series that commissioned 15 artists to create new works inspired by scores included in Womens Work, a magazine edited and self-published by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood in New York City in the mid-1970s.
Information on Annea Lockwood & Ruth Anderson's Tête-à-tête:
It all began with a telephone call. In 1973, the late pioneering electronic composer Ruth Anderson was seeking a substitute to cover a yearlong sabbatical from her position as the director of the Electronic Music Studio she had founded at Hunter College in New York City. Her friend Pauline Oliveros too was on sabbatical, but recommended Ruth call sound artist Annea Lockwood—then living in London—about the post. Already drawn to America by the work of the visionary composers with whom she would soon be labelmates on Lovely Music, Annea jumped at the opportunity and within days of meeting in person the pair were, in her words, “joyously entangled.”
Over the next nine months, while Ruth was living in Hancock, New Hampshire, the couple would speak daily by phone in between visits. Ruth recorded these phone calls and, in 1974, surprised Annea with a cassette containing “Conversations,” a private piece she composed by dexterously collaging fragments of their conversations alongside slowed and throwed snatches of old popular songs: “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby”; “Oh, You Beautiful Doll”; and “Bill Bailey.” The centerpiece of Tête-à-tête, this formerly unreleased side of intimate musique concrète extends to its listeners a rare invitation to eavesdrop on the halcyon phenomenon of two people falling in love. Tender and playful throughout, “Conversations” comes to its zenith with a cut-up of relentless laughter of a contagious beauty that is, for once, properly convulsive.
“For Ruth” is Annea’s elegy to her life partner, who passed away in 2019. The following year, Annea returned to Hancock as well as to Ruth’s resting place of Flathead Lake, Montana to make field recordings, which she wove together with further excerpts of the couple’s 1974 conversations for a commision presented as part of the 2021 Counterflows Festival in Glasgow. A consummate field recordist, Annea imbues the simple sounds of church bells, birds, wind, and the bodies of water that permeated her time alongside Ruth with an otherworldly depth and sense of narrative akin to that of her celebrated sound maps of the Hudson, Danube, and Housatonic rivers. An oneiric, subtly tonal evocation of a meeting at the shores of existence.
Tête-à-tête opens with “Resolutions,” Ruth’s last completed electronic work, from 1984. A meditation for the individual listener composed as the result of her study of Zen, it’s a rigorous, process-driven piece that charts the very slow, smooth descent of a 5th from the octave above middle C down to sub-bass frequencies. Minimalist in execution, yet powerful in effect, it glides by almost imperceptibly, with new tones arriving and hovering or levitating upwards, seemingly out of nowhere. A healing piece, it harnesses the highly focused energy of pure tones as a means to, in Ruth’s words, “further wholeness of self and unity with others.” It has remained unreleased and unheard by the public until now.
Tape transfers by Maggi Payne and lacquers cut at Dubplates & Mastering, with domestic photos and liner notes provided by Annea Lockwood.
The album will be officially released on April 28th, and can be pre-ordered here. Advance copies will be available at the event.
Annea Lockwood’s compositions range from sound art and environmental sound installations to concert music. Recent works include Becoming Air for trumpet, co-composed with performer, composer, and 2011 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Nate Wooley that premiered at ISSUE in 2018, as well as Into the Vanishing Point, co-composed with renowned quartet and 2012 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Yarn/Wire, that serves as a meditation on the large-scale disappearance of insect populations. Both pieces will be released on Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label in September, 2021. Annea's work has also focused on our relationship with the non-human environment and recognizes how interdependent we are with the phenomenal world. That gave rise to the three different river Sound Maps installations, of the Hudson (1982), Danube (2005), Housatonic (2009), and her collaboration with Bob Bielecki, Wild Energy (2014), a site-specific installation focused on geophysical, atmospheric, and mammalian infra- and ultra- sound sources, permanently installed at the Caramoor Center for Music and Arts in Katonah, New York. Her music has been issued on CD, vinyl and online on the Gruenrekorder, Black Truffle, Superior Viaduct, Lovely Music, New World, Ambitus, 3Leaves, XI, EM and other labels. She is a recipient of the SEAMUS (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States) Lifetime Award 2020.
