Ruth Anderson & Annea Lockwood - Tête-à-tête, on music that makes me want to make music
So much of the music I make ends up being sourced from an idea for a process that deforms as I implement it and that ultimately results in sounds that are interesting or emotionally resonant or both for me.
Here's an example: On my release Every Day Carry, I had the idea of essentially ripping off Lucier's I Am Sitting In a Room except instead of staying in one room, moving locations on every re-record. (I Am Sitting in a Room is, if I'm honest, maybe the single most "music that makes me want to make music" that I've ever heard).
The Lucier rip is not the entirety of the underlying structure of that album. I mashed things around and changed course throughout, pursuing, in that case, a feeling that popped out at me when I started listening back to the recordings. But, it started with a straightforward little process idea and bloomed from there.
For several years, the Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood release Tête-à-tête has acted like an engine of different processes for me. It's a beautiful, emotional release and I'd recommend you not only listen but take the time to read the background information on each of the three pieces over on the Bandcamp page. Actually, as I write, I realize that I must have heard this release for the first time right around the birth of my youngest son who was born in May of 2023 and surely that's part of the reason why the emotional core of this music has lodged so thoroughly with me.
Anyway, a brief survey of things about this music that jangle around my head:
- On "Resolutions," Anderson so patiently walks through tonal relationships in a way I constantly want to reproduce. I love a music that feels static but that secretly has constantly running forward motion. A lot of drone (that I also love!) has an almost cyclical or insular motion to it which can be lovely, but "Resolutions" is going somewhere.
- "Resolutions" is one of many pieces that is so simple to describe and yet the implementation arrests me. It reminds me to pull stuff out where I can.
- "Conversations" was originally intended as a private composition, not for anyone to hear but Annea Lockwood. I have this sometimes unhealthy pulse in me to make stuff to share with the world to prove that I'm working, and the entire idea of a totally private composition regularly re-centers for me what it is that I'm even doing as someone who is alive for a finite amount of time around the people I love.
- The totally frank emotional core in both "Conversations" and "For Ruth" serves as a perpetual reminder that an emotional core can burn in the core of otherwise academic music and that's not only ok (Sophie says it's ok to cry, of course) but it's good and desirable. As a neurodivergent person who spent a good chunk of my younger life dangling perilously close to a chasm of facts and logic, these two pieces bring me to tears when I listen closely and make me aspire to make music even a fraction as warm and as loving.