LP + single-sided 10″ – Ergot

The sound artists Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson, who passed in 2019 at the venerable age of ninety-one years old, spent together almost 50 years working together in significant projects and publications, already from the beginning of the electronics music and the diffusion associated with the general accessibility. We have to especially remember their participation to the pioneering anthology Women In Electronic Music 1977, supervised by Charles Amirkhanian, and then New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, an LP split from 1981 on Opus One, not mentioning Sinopah in 1997 for the label Experimental Intermedia of Phill Niblock, or the most tendentious participation to the compilation Lesbian American Composers in 1998 on CRI. Together the two composers took a course on the history of the female music at the Hunter College and planned a book of studies on the hearing, also sharing two houses, in Crompond, New York, and in Flathead Lake, in Montana. Now we have Tête-à-tête, a collection of unpublished and new archive material. This release for Ergot Records is divided on a LP and on 10” single-sided, records where the couple ideally gets back together, with Annea that in “For Ruth” offers us the magic of an elegiac homage to her life partner with audio captures in Hancock, the residence of Ruth Anderson in the seventies, and in Flathead Lake, the place where the composer is buried, some recordings she intertwined with additional selections of conversations dated back to 1974. The sequences are dreamy, and the chirps of birds are modulated with more sacred drones, crickets and bells, street noises and rustling water, stable noises and joyful laughter, confirming the talent of Annea Lockwood, the proof of a fertile meeting on the edges of the existence, in memory of her beloved partner. Before the composition by Annea Lockwood there are “Resolutions” and “Conversations”. The first one is the last electronic work Ruth Anderson completed, in 1984, a repetitive and hypnotic piece, based on the on the very slow and smooth descent of a fifth from the octave above middle C down to the sub-bass frequencies. The other one, still by Ruth, a historic track dated back to mid-seventies, an over 18 minutes long suite composed of greatly collected fragments of conversations of the two experimenters, together with slow-down tracks of old folk songs. So, two existences “happily intertwined” in an intimate concrete music, that will be especially remembered for a relentless laughter and a life spent between sounds intelligently conceived and effective.

 

Ruth Anderson & Annea Lockwood – T​ê​te​-​à​-​t​ê​te