Annea Lockwood was sitting on the shore of Flathead Lake in Montana with her partner, the composer Ruth Anderson. It was the summer of 1975, and it’d been a couple years since the two fell in love. Lockwood was, among other things, enamored with the way Anderson’s music could make her feel “so at peace and so part of everything.” A similar phenomenon was happening here—she was soaking in the sounds around her, like the jet skis and motorboats in the distance. She was fascinated by the difference in speed between human activity and, say, a stone striking water, rippling outwards. “What if we could hear all those rhythms,” she wondered, “as one huge rhythm?”
At the heart of her sentiment is a certain truth: We can learn from the natural world. In 1973, environmentalist and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer released an album documenting the aural quality of Vancouver, a city plagued by noise pollution. “We must again seek the hi-fi soundscape, where all sounds have the proper time and place,” he declared. “This balance is to be found in nature.” (The double LP culminates with croaking frogs.) Whereas Schafer was a polemicist, wanting to impose his ideas onto society, Lockwood is interested in a personal symbiosis with nature, beginning with the humble belief that one is open to change. Her 1975 composition World Rhythms was meant to facilitate such a shift in consciousness.
Requiring 10 speakers, five reel-to-reel machines, and a massive gong, World Rhythms is an ambitious project whose performances involve real-time audio-level changes. Lockwood takes different noises—from volcanic activity in Hawaii to spring peepers near the Mississippi River, crows around Essex, and hydroacoustic signals in the Tasman Sea—and weaves a tapestry in constant flux. This new iteration was partly handled by Room40 label boss Lawrence English, who reconstructed the original master tapes and blended them with recent performances by Lockwood and Vanessa Tomlinson, who plays the gong. There are mud pools from Yellowstone National Park that have a squeamish gurgle, and hearing them amid a crackling bonfire feels unexpectedly harmonious, even plausible. The lapping waves that arrive shortly thereafter are an alarming detour, but their presence quickly feels normal. Lockwood doesn’t aim for shock and awe, or even a logical throughline—she wants you to encounter the simple vividness of sound.
Lockwood accomplishes this by treating all material with equal reverence, whether it’s a person’s breath or radio waves of neutron stars. It’s striking to realize that the sound of slow breathing here isn’t far off from a bubbling geyser, or that the tam-tam echoes with a slow, oceanic roar. It’s also notable that, throughout the record, there are so many water sounds that anyone could ostensibly recognize, from a placid stream to a cascading thunderstorm. The sonic vocabulary we all have, accumulating across the passage of time, is both vast and blurry. Lockwood exploits that conundrum, and even takes part in it.
This subtle friction animates World Rhythms. These sounds, so vibrant and familiar and patient in their unraveling, point to what is possible when listening is treated both seriously and creatively. In its approach to listening, World Rhythms marks a subtle but important break with its predecessors. In the mid-20th century, field recordings fell into a few different camps, most of which were straightforward. People strived to record particular animal sounds or preserve traditional music, while others documented specific events or catalogued ordinary environs. The most lasting albums were built on the tradition of musique concrète, leading to dense, mesmerizing collages. Closest in spirit to Lockwood’s composition are the old 1950s LPs tracing the parallels between different cultures and sounds. But the narration on such releases, by writers like Langston Hughes and Harold Courlander, made them didactic and tedious. On World Rhythms, Lockwood trusts the listener to hear the arc of its noises, to trace their emergence and disappearance, their strange, seductive confluence.
I have listened to World Rhythms in a multitude of settings: in my car, on a walk, when I wake, while eating dinner. It never seems particularly unique until it finishes, when I suddenly hear everything anew: footsteps now buoy clanging dishware, rustling leaves ornament everyday chatter. Everything feels heightened, like it transcends three dimensions, but it also feels like all sounds are arranged in a perfect symphony. Lockwood’s music instills joy in listening, and such revitalized desire leaves your body freshly tender, sensitive to whatever pierces the ear. World Rhythms doesn’t exactly end when its 38 minutes are up—it simply fades into reality, its ideas resonating in perpetuity.
