Annea Lockwood: Becoming Air; Into the Vanishing Point in Bloomington, MN

Annea Lockwood
is underrated as a force in avant-garde music, combining electronics and found sounds with an environmental bent at a time when few composers, and perhaps no women, were doing such things. She has remained active into old age, and her language has continued to develop; both works on this
Black Truffle
release are new and contain new ideas.
Lockwood
's interest in environmental sounds has progressed to environmental activism.
Into the Vanishing Point
addresses the global crash in insect populations. The subject is clear if the listener is prepared with background (which must be sought out), but perhaps less so if one encounters the work cold. Less elusive is
Becoming Air
, which
developed together with the trumpeter here,
Nate Wooley
. In this work,
uses electronics to destabilize
Wooley
's control over his instrument, making pitch fluctuate and timbre wobble and "forcing" the trumpet into high notes where it is extremely uncomfortable. The idea is abstract, but the work is quite evocative of questions regarding the relationship between acoustic and electronic instruments and between human agency and the technological world more generally. Beyond all this,
shows that the experimental spirit of musical electronics in the 1960s and 1970s is alive and well in the ongoing work of this remarkable figure. ~ James Manheim