Annea Lockwood Piano‑Destruction at Counterflows
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- Annea Lockwood led a piano‑seance at Glasgow’s Counterflows festival, where a broken upright piano was half‑buried and audience members scraped and tapped it with garden debris, creating “strange noises”.
- Annea Lockwood has been burying, burning, or drowning pianos since the 1960s, a practice she frames as “transformed” rather than destroyed, highlighting her lifelong exploration of sound change.
- Piano Burning (1968) recorded an old piano set alight, first with asbestos‑wrapped microphones, then a night‑time session with balloons that popped, and a “seance for Beethoven” captured on tape.
- Piano Garden (1969) planted a piano in a garden near Lockwood’s Essex home, allowing plants to grow through its mechanism; when an elderly passerby played “Für Elise”, the result was “beautifully out of tune”.
- World Rhythms (1975) combines field recordings of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers and human biorhythms; a new expanded version remastered by Lawrence English adds additional original tapes, revealing more of Lockwood’s collected sounds.
- Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood maintained a decades‑long personal and artistic partnership, creating private tape collages like “Conversations” and later releasing “For Ruth”, which blends field recordings with their phone‑call samples after Anderson’s 2019 death.
- Counterflows festival featured a performance of Bayou‑Borne, written for Pauline Oliveros, with an accordionist joined by percussion, trumpet, flute, and violins, improvising as they entered from the room’s edges, paying tribute to Oliveros.
Why it matters: Lockwood’s revived performances and expanded releases give audiences and fellow experimental musicians fresh, immersive sound‑scapes that turn discarded objects and historic sites into audible histories, while preserving personal archives that would otherwise be lost. The new remastered World Rhythms and the posthumous “For Ruth” album also provide scholars with richer primary material on environmental and political sound‑mapping.
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