See-through Music

See-through Music brings to print, for the first time, the poetic notes Annea Lockwood wrote for her BBC radio series Trance and Ritual Music (1970–73). Over the course of eight broadcasts, the iconic composer curated a transglobal archive of trance and ritual sound, from Malayan healing rites to Korean ancestral dances and Hasidic work songs, layered with her own compositions and narrated in a voice both lyrical and invocational. Lockwood's texts, written to accompany these radio transmissions, offer meditative fragments that collapse the distance 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 archive in dialogue with a contemporary lineage of ritual materiality including artists working with glass, vibration and trance.