The moving, curious, and ever-innovative work of Annea Lockwood – whom Rewire dedicates a focus programme around in 2024 – has spanned over 50 years of concert music, field recordings, performance art, and multimedia installations. Born in New Zealand in 1939, Lockwood has had a lifelong fascination with the ways in which someone’s environment affects the sounds around them and vice versa, with a focus on healing, nature, and human connection. “I feel that sounds are autonomous – they have a sort of life span,” she says in an interview with The Quietus. “That's at the bottom of a lot of my work.” Her music lives and listens to life.

A recent publication with the late composer Ruth Anderson gathers their co-authored Hearing Studies (2021) – developed together over years and years as partners and collaborators – cementing in its own way Lockwood’s reputation as a generous musician who thrives in collaboration, forever gifting audiences and peers her considerate knowledge and her undiluted sounds. T​ê​te​-​à​-​t​ê​te – released on Ergot Records as an album by Anderson and Lockwood in 2023 – is a monument to Lockwood and Anderson’s relationship, starting from a musique concrète sound collage made in the early 1970s, Anderson’s “Conversations,” that let listeners eavesdrop on fragments of phone conversations between the two – recorded as they fell in love with one another. It also includes “For Ruth,” Lockwood’s elegy to her life partner: a sombre, touching, and joyful piece is abundant in the sensitive, playful, quiet sounds that flood Lockwood’s oeuvre.