Tokafi has published an interesting interview with sound artist Annea Lockwood.
Annea Lockwood once called herself a ‘river fanatic’. That, she now says, may have been too strong a word. For one, her oeuvre encompasses a lot more than just her work with water, extending from chamber- and vocal music to electro-acoustic compositions, installations and events. Nonetheless, she’s happy to admit that she finds “rivers, their power, the way they carve through the landscape, change, sound, the way light plays on their surfaces, the ways they affect human history, endlessly interesting.” You can hear this passion in her three Sound Maps of the Hudson, Danube and Housatonic rivers. Each of them is both acoustic representation and artistic interpretation at the same time, a creative, social, political, ecological and sonic discussion of the structures growing around it. This was clearest, perhaps, on the Sound Map of the Danube, on which expansive interviews in many different languages and the turbulent run of the river from its humble beginnings to a wild release into the Black Sea added a strong sense of narrative and tension to the composition. Compared to the dynamics of the Danube, Lockwood’s latest Sound Map of the Housatonic river, released on Ákos Garai’s 3LEAVES label, is a far more quiet and subtle work, almost meditatively focused on tiny variations in water movement. But there’s more behind this tranquil surface than meets the ear. Ecological and personal topics hide behind a veil of delicacy, opening up bigger questions the more one immerses oneself in it. A Sound Map of the Housatonic River demands time, patience and active emotional engagement from the listener. But once one is in knee-deep, there’s no escape from its riveting rapids.
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