See-through Music

‘Sound can change the inner and the outer skin of us,’ wrote Annea Lockwood. Between 1970 and 1973, the pioneering composer explored ritual, trance and ceremonial sound from around the world. Travelling from Malayan healing rites and Korean shamanism to Hasidic chant, Lockwood layered archival recordings with her own compositions in a series of broadcasts.

See-through Music, for the first time, gathers Lockwood’s poetic writings that accompanied them: meditative texts dissolving the boundaries between sound and language, ritual and transmission, the listener and the world. ‘These sounds... are not to make music, but to invoke man to himself,’ said Lockwood.

With an introductory essay by Xenia Benivolski and a new score by Tomoko Sauvage, See-through Music places Lockwood’s sonic and archival practice in dialogue with a contemporary lineage of ritual materiality and extends the patterns – of sound, breath, pulse, glass, water and vibration – within it.