This talk features two musical iconoclasts working in vastly different realms. Renowned composer Annea Lockwood has been making pivotal strides in experimental music since the 1960s, challenging the ways we present and receive sound. She is known best for the striking performance pieces she made for Fluxus – which included burning and drowning pianos in a pond. Throughout the 1970s, Lockwood’s work questioned musical objects and environments, asking questions about what gets to be the host body of sound. Through the years, her work has continued to evolve, while also retaining its conceptual spirit: recent pieces include Ear-Walking Woman, a revision of the ‘prepared piano’ that will be performed at hcmf// 2020 by Sarah Cahill.
Through treated vocals, glitched melodies and looping rhythmic pulses, Auclair makes a firm break with reality, installing surrealism into everyday life. Having made abstract electro-pop for labels such as Kit Records, her music has found a space between density and sparsity, playing noisy textures and hushed minimalism off of one another. Works such as In Waves sum up Auclair’s sound: moments of clarity are woven through an otherwise surreal tapestry of day dreaming electronics and percussive cascades, her voice still in an ever-changing world. Her newest work includes a physical release of The Swarm, an opera about bees she made with Heloise Tunstall-Behrens, and Munganyinka is a Transformer, a solo piece for bass clarinet that appears at hcmf// 2020 as part of the Zeitgeist Commissions.