Label: Black Truffle

85歳になった巨匠作家の新作!!60年代に多彩なガラスのサウンドを使用したコンサートを展開、その後水の動きに魅了され川の音のサウンドアーカイブを手掛ける様になるニュージーランド出身の巨匠サウンドアーティストAnnea Lockwood。Black Truffleからは3作目となる2025年LP作品。北アイルランド紛争中の1970年代初頭、カトリック系住民とプロテスタント系住民の居住区を分けるために築かれた壁"ピース・ライン"。その壁そのものに着目し、手や石、葉っぱといった物を使って、壁を巨大な共鳴楽器のように演奏したサイドA[On Fractured Ground]。サイドB[Skin Resonance]はオーストラリアの作曲家兼パーカッショニストVanessa Tomlinsonとのコラボ録音で、演奏家とバスドラムの関係にフォーカスし、"動物的であり"、"木であり"、"金属的"な楽器に内包される複雑な繋がりを考察。



Legendary New Zealand-born experimental composer and sound art pioneer Annea Lockwood returns to Black Truffle with On Fractured Ground / Skin Resonance, her third release for the label. Having recently celebrated her 85th birthday, Lockwood shows no sign of slowing down in her exploration of new sound sources and collaborations with an ever-growing intergenerational pool of performers – here with Vanessa Tomlinson. Her creative vibrancy is alive as ever on the two recent works presented here, which demonstrate both her engagement with the social dimensions of sound and the deeply reflective, meditative aspect of her art.

On Fractured Ground derives from material recorded with Pedro Rebelo and Georgios Varoutsos for the soundtrack of Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon’s opera-film, History of the Present (2023). Working together in Belfast, Lockwood, Rebelo and Varoutsos made extensive recordings of the city’s ‘peace lines’, the dozens of walls erected since the beginning of the Troubles in the late 1960s to separate Catholic and Protestant areas of the city. Struck by the immensity of these barriers, ‘the brutal way they sever neighbourhoods’, Lockwood and her collaborators focused not on the sound environment of the city, but on the walls themselves, playing them as gigantic resonant instruments, using their hands and objects such as stones and leaves. Continuing to work in her studio with the material collected for the soundtrack after its completion, Lockwood composed the work presented here, occupying a space somewhere between her own extended-technique percussion music and the Cagean tradition of hyper-amplified small sounds. From deep, gong-like metallic tolling to dry scrapes and uneasy groans, the piece’s sustained attention to single sounds derived from unorthodox sources draws a line all the way back to Lockwood’s classic Glass World (1967-1970). Its spaciousness and delicacy are at odds with the dark historical background of the Troubles, creating a moving listening experience somehow haunted by the shadow of violence and conflict.

Skin Resonance is a collaboration with Australian composer and percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson. Developed through conversations in which the two discussed the idea of ‘sonic attraction’, the piece focuses on Tomlinson’s relationship to the bass drum, reflecting on the complex web of connections embodied in this seemingly simple instrument, which is at once ‘animal, wood, and metal’. Approaching the instrument in a suitably elemental fashion, Tomlinson’s performance strips away conventional technique to explore the resonance and timbral properties of skin, drum, and metal hardware, producing overlapping waves of texture that at times seem closer to wind swishing through leaves or the ocean than anything usually associated with a drum. Emphasising the symbiotic relationship between performer and instrument, Tomlinson’s voice is heard at times, exploring the field of associations and connections the bass drum suggests to her: ‘Maybe the bass drum skin is an ear as well?’

Accompanied by insightful liner notes on both pieces and photographs documenting the recording of On Fractured Ground and a performance of Skin Resonance, this LP is a moving testament to the engagement, generosity, and openness that sustain Annea Lockwood’s work, still finding new directions after more than fifty years of activity.