Heather Lockie is an Los Angeles-based composer, performer, and painter who creates graphic scores, soundscapes, songs, installations, improvisations, and through-composed works. Using stringed instruments, voice, and found objects, Lockie’s work stretches from ensemble and solo performance to formal string arrangements for herself and for others, to realizing her own graphic scores in performance. Drawing from whatever soundmaking devices are at hand - a string trio, close vocal harmonies, a penny whistle, live-processed field recording, an oven rack, a folk song, a bell - she has imagined a unique hybrid form where traditional song form can intentionally - or aleatorically - merge with abstract sound-painting expressions and organic sonic pathways.
Her forthcoming album with her group Marshweed Ensemble, "Point of Contact", employs such logic, presenting a thematic collection of music about life in LA. Lockie’s 2018 album "Marshweed in the Garden" was released on Casa Berenice Recordings. She is half of the experimental duo Spiders with Kalashnikovs, which premiered new work at the Black Mountain College Museum in July 2023, and has premiered her graphic score pieces with Southland Ensemble and with Dog Star Festival. She also co-curates and co-produces experimental music concerts at the house venue Casa Berenice Recordings. Lockie’s performances and residencies include Centrum, Hill House Residency, STEIM, PACT-Zollverein, and — in Los Angeles — Dog Star Festival, Machine Project, NEWTOWN (Pasadena Art Alliance), the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS).
In addition to her own projects and solo work, Lockie has worked with internationally-known artists such as Ty Segall, David Kendricks (Sparks, DEVO), Fun., Spiritualized, Scott Wieland (STP), Arthur Lee/LOVE, Eels, Cory Hanson/WAND, and others in a variety of venues, from the Royal Albert Hall in London to the late-night tv circuit (Letterman/Leno/Jools Holland) to playing in galleries such as LACMA and The Hammer Museum. She has an MFA (Performer/Composer) from California Institute of the Arts and a BA from Occidental College (Comp Lit-French/English).
At the moment she is most interested in these things: birds; how things grow; seeds as simple machines that unpack themselves; worms and the effect of their castings on an ailing fruit tree; color symbolism in musical notation; circular knitting; how to teach complex abstract musical stuff to kids via simple activities that verge on ephemera; how to represent temporal and pitch information in a picture; why and how hummingbird wings sound the way they do; canning and drying the fruit grown by her eight fruit trees each year; earliest existing keyboard music; sewing bolster pillows from scratch.
@marshweedinthegarden
marshweed.bandcamp.com
