Annea Lockwood’s debut album, originally released in 1970, now back in circulation via Room 40. It’s a newly remastered edition, accompanied by a book featuring a conversation between Annea Lockwood and Lawrence English as well as previously unseen documentation of her works including Piano Transplants, World Rhythms and more.A download is also included.

‘Glass World’ is the resoundingly classic debut by a pioneering American artist whose tactile, holistic approach to sound craft has been crucial in blurring distinctions between academic, sound art, and experimental musics for half a century. The album’s 23 vignette-like pieces derive from hands-on experiments with the form and function of glass in a musical context, using various techniques to stimulate and animate glass objects and revel in their familiar yet peculiar acoustic resonances and ringing overtones.

The purely instrumental parts flow over the user in an effortlessly enchanting passage of time, future-proofed by their plaintive simplicity but riddled with the sort of detail that snags on first listen and rewards with repeat returns.  (Boomkat review)

Note from Lawrence English

“To attempt to summarise the journey of Annea Lockwood’s life, as a composer and performer, is difficult if not impossible. For six decades now, she has carved out a multifarious and fluid existence that has orbited various musical movements and approaches. Hers is a life led by intuition, curiosity and listening, one in which passion is paramount and wonderment abounds.

If you were to reflect upon one aspect of her way of being that holds the greatest gravity in her day to day, it is perhaps listening that resonates most vibrantly. It is a practice that she has sought to deepen, with an unwavering dedication across her life, and a it is practice that has sustained her in the absolute. It’s here that Glass World comes into focus for it documents some of her first significant studies into sound, object and listening. It is a recording that captures her in a moment of profound fascination with a rather familiar material, glass.

This recording celebrates many things, amongst them Lockwood’s willingness to allow single sounds to resonate, fully. Across each of the twenty three vignettes captured here, Annea Lockwood invites us to lean into the material nature of sound with her. Glass World shimmers with an almost fanatical incandescence. It radiates a vibrational intensity that holds as strongly today as it did upon its original release in 1970 on Tangent Records. I had the privilege to re-master these recordings, under the guidance of Annea, and sitting with them so intensely was nothing but a delight.

In tandem with this project, Annea and I have undertaken a long-form in conversation, which is collected in the book which sits alongside this edition. The conversation splays outward from Annea’s work on Glass World and it deliberately seeks to visit upon her interests and passions, and through doing so revel a certain perspective that has guided her ways of being, and ways of making.

It’s an honour to have the opportunity to share this edition with you. I hope you too can catch Annea’s resonate curiosity and be as captivated by these sounds as I (and many others) have been. ”

Tracks

1.  Micro Glass Shaken 01:41
2.  Glass Rod Vibrating 01:49
3.  Turning Gong 01:29
4.  Mini Mobile 02:12
5.  Wine Glass 01:43
6.  Water Gong 05:52
7.  Two Ribbed Discs 01:56
8.  Rod Across Edge Of Pane 02:09
9.  Glass Bulb 00:49
10. Glissandi 00:25
11. Spinning Discs 01:48
12. Dialogue: Bottles And Jars 01:44
13. Vibrating Pane 02:02
14. Bubbling 01:43
15. Breathing Machine 02:35
16. Water Jars 01:34
17. Rod Roll 01:06
18. Micro Glass On Goblet 01:06
19. Micro Glass Along Pane 01:23
20. Cullet: Two Glass Rocks 01:35
21. Medium Mobile 02:33
22. Bottle Tree Showered With Fragments 00:46
23. Deep Water Gong 04:16

“I have become fascinated by the complexity of the single sound.” – (Annea Lockwood)