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viewing 1 To 2 of 2 items
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LP + 10"
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ERG 008LP
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Over the course of a nearly 50 year romantic and creative partnership sound artist Annea Lockwood and the late pioneering electronic composer 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. Although Ruth passed away in 2019, the composers' dialogue continues today with Tête-à-tête, a collection of unreleased archival and new material spread across an LP and a single-sided 10" record. It all began with a telephone call. In 1973, 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 Annea Lockwood -- then living in London -- about the post. 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 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. In 2020, Annea returned to Hancock as well as to Ruth's resting place at Flathead Lake, Montana to make field recordings, which she wove together with further excerpts of the couple's 1974 conversations for a commission 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. The collection 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 fifth 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. Tape transfers by Maggi Payne and lacquers cut at Dubplates & Mastering, with domestic photos and liner notes provided by Annea Lockwood.
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LP
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ERG 004LP
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2022 repress on clear vinyl, in an edition of 500; newly remastered by Rashad Becker. Dominique Lawalrée (b. 1954) is a composer born and based in Brussels. First Meeting is Lawalrée's first archival release to date. Culled from four different albums originally self-published on his private label Editions Walrus, circa 1978-1982, this compilation highlights the composer's unique sense of ambient and minimal composition. Originally considered for release on Brian Eno's Obscure Records, Lawalrée's music is now no longer hidden. In this collection the listener finds the sounds of piano, synthesizers, percussion, Wurlitzer, organ, and voice, all performed by Lawalrée. Using these tools Dominique creates miniature themes that gallop across the speakers in slow motion, stretching our normal sense of dynamics and color, effortlessly widening the stereo plane. On "Musique Satieerique," Dominique pays homage to the influence of Satie with simple repeated piano figures and a lush field of organs and flutes. And on other selections, like "La Maison Des 5 Elements," he takes a more wistful, ambient approach, layering keyboard lines, and invoking found/tape sounds to create a hypnogogic world of his own. Childlike in its playfulness and surreal to the bone, the music spins like a carrousel placed inside the Rothko Chapel. Lawalrée's sense of timbre, tone, and overarching composition is like an impression of a home movie whose charm lies in its knowledge of intimacy, shared by few. An incantation of innocence.
"a quiet, understated music that is both touching and elegant" --Gavin Bryars.
"What is most affecting is the feeling of parabolic calm that can emerge from this music, ascending gradually. It's atypically devoid of New-age cliché, closer somehow to a secular revelation than to any protracted or consensus bliss." --Keith Connolly, BOMB Magazine.
"Part of the charm of Lawalrée's work, and perhaps why he never broke through into broader consciousness, was the obliquely personal nature of his albums, which sometimes felt like improvised sound diaries, or like incremental explorations of deeply individualistic themes... A beautiful rediscovery." --Jon Dale, Uncut.
"Harold Budd is an obvious reference point, but Lawalrée's brilliantly economical music eschews the grand, systematizing ambitions of most minimalist music, and has a tactility and sense of particular time and place that places it closer to Angelo Badalamenti, Popol Vuh's Hosianna Mantra, or even Broadcast. This may be the first meeting, but hopefully not the last." --Derek Walmsley, The Wire
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