Beginning in the late 1950s and the rise of the Fluxus movement, people started treating the piano rather roughly. Al Hansen dropped one from a house, and in Wiesbaden in 1962, a crowd of different performers completely dismantled one. Annea Lockwood preferred to let pianos burn, drown, or even plant an entire garden around them. The Aotearoa-born sound artist was not interested in destruction, but transformation in her »Piano Transplants« series. More than half a century after this, she still is.
»On Fractured Ground« and »Skin Resonance« are two different pieces that make up her third release of Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label. The former is based on recordings made together with Pedro Rebelo and Georgios Varoutsos at the so-called Peace Lines, separation barriers dividing the different religious/political factions in Belfast. The trio used these walls as resonant bodies, playing them with their hands, leaves, or stones, before Lockwood used the resulting recordings to construct a roughly 14-minute-long piece. This, too, is a piece of transformation, contrasting the rigidity of the Peace Lines and the social and political boundaries they both represent and enforce by turning it into ominous, ever-shifting drones. It sounds like something crumbling most of the time, and sometimes as if someone was rubbing objects on the skin of a drum.
Fittingly, »Skin Resonance« is a collaboration with drummer Vanessa Tomlinson, who approaches her bass drum in idiosyncratic ways. Over the course of a little over 17 minutes, Tomlinson creates all kinds of discrete sonic events with different pieces of the drum as well as her voice for a seemingly through-composed piece that also uses droning sounds, but never fully eschews rhythm. Calling to mind both the drum abstractions of Jon Mueller and the intricacies of Valentina Magaletti’s solo work, this work too turns the instrument into something else.
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