This is a film about listening.

Documentary filmmaker Sam Green invites us into experimental composer Annea Lockwood’s world of listening. Highly recommended for anyone interested in “deep listening” and the positive effects it can have, the 30-minute short film works almost as a guided meditation / listening practice with the director asking viewers at various points in the film to close their eyes and simply listen. “Please wear headphones if you can; the experience will be much stronger.”

A lifelong friend of fellow composer and deep listener Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood has for decades “studied how sound can have visceral and profound effects on attentive listening bodies.” Her work ranges from concert music featuring prepared piano, glass, and other instruments to surrealistic performance art, field recordings of natural found sounds, and multimedia installations.

“I wanted to entice people into really listening intensively,” Lockwood once reflected. “Into really listening. I wanted a deep immersion in the sounds of themselves, for the audience.”

“It’s centrally important to me that I find a way to draw people’s whole beings inside the sounds that I am giving them… Sound is a wonderful medium through which to come to a sense, a whole body sense, of that connectivity between us and the rest of the world.”

Interestingly, Lockwood doesn’t often listen to music these days because she finds it to be too intense. Instead, she goes out to the deck behind her house every night at dusk and “listens to the sound of the world.”

Rent Annea Lockwood / A Film About Listening on Vimeo:

If you enjoyed the film, we highly recommend reading this article by director Sam Green here: https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/sam-green-annea-lockwood