Wild Energy
2014
Artist: Annea Lockwood with Bob Bielecki
This work was originally made as a site-specific installation focused on geophysical, atmospheric and mammalian infra and ultra sound sources, and is permanently installed at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, Katonah, New York.
Please listen with headphones or good speakers
Listening/Being
Annea Lockwood
August 2021
In 1963 I spent some weeks in the Mosel valley area, near the old German city of Trier, immersed in the landscape, enjoying the area’s delicious wines and studying German. One of my most vivid memories is of sitting on a hillside holding a rock in my hands and trying to sense the nature of its being; asking what it feels like to be stone, a material that is not inert but that has its own intrinsic energies. Within a few years I was working with glass, a rich sonic material that brought me direct experience of what I previously sensed in the rock - intrinsic energy. I found that the vibrational energy released from the glass by my touch very easily moved beyond my control. The glass shaped its own sounds in ways I could not design or anticipate. In addition to being terrific ear training, my Glass Concerts opened my mind to the possibility that closely attentive, open-ended exploration can bring a glimpse of the life within ‘inanimate’ matter and in environmental phenomena, a vital recognition.
This approach is fascinating to me, and underlies much of my work. Some of my most nourishing experiences in this respect have come through working with rivers. As I sound-mapped the Hudson, the Danube and the Housatonic, listening to them shaping their banks (and thus to their sounds in real time), I learned that they have agency and are indeed alive, as many people living beside them assert. I have found that if I like a particular mix of sounds at a certain spot on a river I need to record it right away; tomorrow, that water riffle will be different, or might have vanished altogether. Similarly, working together with the ensemble Yarn/Wire on our recent collaborative composition Into the Vanishing Point (2019) and relishing the way Laura Barger’s strips of bicycle inner tube squealed on piano strings, I could hear that the strings build energy autonomously. The intensity of the sound changes beyond her control; the details are different each time she plays. A shared pleasure and fascination with this process of releasing control, and with the performer’s resulting vulnerability, is also where composer and trumpet player Nate Wooley and I started from when we composed Becoming Air together in 2017.*
I began recording rivers in the late 1960s. I was motivated by my love of the complex textures in the sounds which moving water and gravity create, and by an intuition that these sounds can be nourishing to human bodies and minds (although the terror and devastation which flooding and storms now increasingly bring is a different order of experience). By the time I was working on A Sound Map of the Hudson River (1982) my intention was to record and then compose the flow of the work in such a way that a listener can feel immersed in the river, not separate from it, purely through its sonic energy. Rivers are often largely a visual pleasure for us, but when their sounds course through our bodies as we listen, their energy becomes powerfully present.
My sound maps of the Hudson and the Danube include audio interviews with people living on or near those rivers: the river people. With the Hudson, my focus was largely on accounts given by the six people I interviewed of direct experiences of the river’s powerful currents on their bodies. Most people experience the Hudson through their eyes, but the power of that river lies precisely in what you cannot sense purely visually. Ten years later I wanted to dig deeper into why we are so drawn to rivers and what they mean to us. So, as I worked my way downstream on the Danube, I asked everyone I interviewed two questions: “What does the river mean to you?”, and then “Could you live without it?” With one exception, these questions drew out the deeply interdependent character of those men and women’s relationships with the river and its environment, and often, their passionate love for it. The conversations were recorded in the speakers’ native languages and can be heard in the mix; English transcriptions are included in the CD publication of the sound map (by Lovely Music) and in installations of the works.
I have always hoped that the experience of such close listening might encourage in listeners the desire to protect rivers. Leah Barclay, the Australian composer, sound artist, designer and researcher, shows us how. Like me, she has been fascinated by aquatic environments for a number of years, and her brilliantly creative ways of enabling communities to reconnect to local rivers and bodies of water and to develop conservation practices take listening to rivers to the essential and urgent next level. Details on her research, her work with UNESCO, and other projects can be found at https://www.leahbarclay.com
“Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au.” Translated from Maori into English, this saying acknowledges that “I am the river and the river is me”. This form of consciousness is consequential in the most practical way: in New Zealand a parliamentary bill articulates the government’s recognition that the Whanganui River/ Te Awa Tupua, including “its tributaries, and all its physical and metaphysical elements”, is the indivisible and living whole that the river’s people, the iwi and hapu of Te Awa Tupua, have always known it to be. After the tribes’ long struggle to protect the river, Te Awa Tupua “is now a legal person, and has all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person” by act of Parliament. This status ensures that if the river should be harmed now, the law will not discriminate between harming the tribes and harming the river: they are indivisible. The river is kin.
Sound entering our bodies forms a connection with the source of that sound and potentially brings a sense of non-separation. My understanding of this flow of connection crystalised in 2012, when I watched a PBS documentary on the work of Dr. Milton Garces and his colleagues at the Infrasound Laboratory at the University of Hawai’i. Their research includes making recordings of infrasound tremors, bench collapses and other events coming from Hawai’i’s Mount Kilauea volcano. The sounds I heard galvanized my whole body. I immediately wanted them; I wanted to work with them and to immerse myself in their energies. Dr. Garces responded very generously when I contacted him, sending me audio clips and giving me access to his Soundcloud site.
A year later the composer Stephan Moore was curating an exhibition of sound art for the Caramoor Center for the Arts and he approached me with a commission. This opened up an opportunity to work with the Infrasound Laboratory’s extraordinary sound resources. I invited sound designer and inventor Bob Bielecki to collaborate with me, and we started working on the sound installation, Wild Energy. This is now permanently installed among trees and rocks at the Caramoor Center – a perfect site for the work. Over a time span of forty-seven minutes a rich and diverse medley of sounds interweave, advance and recede: infrasound from Mount Kilauea, earthquakes, hydrothermal vents and solar oscillations, ultrasound from a Scots pine tree, various bats (all transposed into the human hearing range), plus radio waves in the form of VLF whistlers, chorus waves and Auroral Kilometric Radiation. The sounds are diffused through multiple hidden speakers and they intertwine with the ambient sounds of the place in which the sound work is embedded.
An excerpt is presented here. It starts with volcanic tremors at the Pu’u O’o vent on Mount Kilauea, plus atmospheric whistlers (electromagnetic waves generated by lightning which travel along the earth’s magnetic field lines), a pipistrelle bat and a Sei whale, before returning to the volcano. A short silence follows, then we hear woodblock-like sounds from ruptures in the interior water columns of trees under drought conditions, myotis and silver-haired bats, the low pulsing of hydrothermal vents fountaining up from the sea floor off the coast of Washington State, and acoustic emissions from the sun: immensely long acoustical pressure waves which travel under the surface of the sun causing it to oscillate, and which have been sped up 42,000 times. Following this comes the sounds of another bench collapse on Mount Kilauea.
How to listen to this? Maybe by stretching out in a hammock or on cushions, your body relaxed and open, so that the sounds enter you fully and the experience becomes visceral. These are vibrations emanating from phenomena which affect us fundamentally, forming an inaudible web within which we move and through which we live. As they pass through your listening body, they form a visceral connection to the earth’s forces. You are not separate from them; the underlying reality of non-separation is experienced, and you listen within.
Here’s a practice which I like to do at night in my tree-filled backyard:
Listening with… (created for World Listening Day, 2019)
Listening with the neighborhood at midnight, or at dawn.
Listening with an awareness that all around you are other life-forms simultaneously listening and sensing with you – plant roots, owls, centipedes, cicadas – mutually intertwined within the web of vibrations which animate and surround our planet.
Listening so closely with a river that you enter the river, are listening inside the river’s flow.
Becoming one with the river as its sound enters your body – right here, not separate.
Listening with a volcanic vent, movement from within a tree, the sun’s oscillations, as those vibrations pulse inside your body and tickle your synapses – thus, not separate.
What we are at one with, we cannot harm.
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*Becoming Air and Into the Vanishing Point are now released as a vinyl album on the Black Truffle label, BT080. An essay by Lockwood and Wooley on the making of Becoming Air has been published in Arcana X: musicians on music, edited by John Zorn, 2021.
Annea Lockwood and Earl Howard at Wild Energy. Photo by Liz Phillips
