«Sound entering our body forms a connection with the source of that sound and potentially brings a form of non-separation.» Annea Lockwood

You Listening With is a River is a listening workshop. In a small group, we will work though a series of listening exercises adapted from works by Annea Lockwood, Ruth Anderson, AM Kanngieser, and ourselves. The sequence explores Annea Lockwood’s work on «listening with» in relation with possible past and present contemporaries. We are curious about what forms of engagement or connection might grow from practices of patient or enthusiastic listening that support somatic experiences of holding consciousness of inseparability. 
The workshop will consist of: an activity to do during the week before the workshop, several exercises to do together online, time for reflection in small groups and the larger group, and an activity to do in the week following the workshop.

The workshop responds to Annea’s methodologies and adresses themes like intimacy, collaboration and collectivity. We’re interested in how Annea starts from the global sound of a moment in spacetime and hones in on focal details of its materiality in order to build a sonic environment where listeners find their own global/focal energy transfers.
This workshop is a development of our ongoing research into how to think and make in intergenerational relation with the practices developed by Annea’s generation of queer feminist composers and listeners.

In the sonic poem developped for the workshop we reference three of Anneas works. «Water and Memory» (on being a resonant body in a resonating world), ‘For Ruth’ (listening in specific social intimacies and questions around listening positionality), and ‘Wild Enegies’ and the river works (allowing the world in, to ‘listen with’ the multiple environments).

We understand listening as a more-than-sonic experience. This workshop is suitable for people with diverse embodied experiences of hearing and listening, including people who identify as D/deaf, hard of hearing, neurodiverse, or who have specific sensitivities around auditory processing. We can offer auto captions during the event, text versions of all the activity prompts in advance, and the option to hold the the discussion via zoom chat or spoken conversation. We are happy to adapt the structure and format of the workshop to meet the access needs of any participants if you get in touch in advance.

Aio Frei and Cannach MacBride are friends who sometimes make work together through their shared care for listening.
Cannach is a White Scottish artist, educator, and editor. They are doing PhD research at CRiSAP on positioned modes of listening as a creative practice that might function decolonially.
Aio is a White Swiss sound artist, sonic community organizer and graphic designer. Their practice consists of listening workshops, research-based listening performances, essayistic djing, semi-modular synthesis, various forms of microphony, and free electroacoustic improvisation.
Both are deeply interested in questions concerning ethics of listening – in socio-political, environmental, embodied, and queer practices of listening within situated contexts.