See-through Music

‘Sound can change the inner and the outer skin of us,’ wrote Annea Lockwood in her poetic script for Trance and Ritual Music. In her BBC Radio 3 broadcast series (1970-3), the iconic composer constellated ritual, trance and ceremonial sounds from around the world, made by those who ‘use their music to carry them from one self through to another, more buried self.’ From Malayan healing rites and Korean shamanism to Hasidic chant, Lockwood layered archival sounds with her own compositions, narrating them in a voice both lyrical and invocational.

See-through Music, for the first time, publishes Lockwood's texts: meditative fragments that collapse the distances between listener and sound, ritual and broadcast, self and transformation. ‘These sounds... are not to make music, but to invoke man to himself,’ Lockwood writes. With an introductory essay by Xenia Benivolski and a 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.