Ground Water

Description:

Groundwater was a performance by musician Martin Gotfrit and writer Colin Browne that offered a collaborative meditation on inherited musical and linguistic representations of paradise, paternity, and facism. The work was structured in seven non-representational portraits that became fields for analyzing fragments of history, narrative, memory, melody, myth, lost news, landscape, the pastoral, lyric forms, voice, betrayal, and yearning. 

The music and text in Ground Water were performed live using voice and electronic instruments. Taped sequences included processed field recordings, short wave radio signals, railway yard sound effects, marching songs of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and fragments of popular songs and newsreels. 

The text excerpted Hesiod, Virgil, Tiberianus, Alan de Lille, St. Boniface, Dante Alighieri, Thomas Hardy, C.H. Douglas, William Thompson, Hugh Mackenzie, Federico García Lorca, Buenaventura Duritti, and Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen and Oberleutnant Harro Harder. 

The duration was approximately seventy-five minutes with a short pause to change tapes.