Works » By Title » G » Ground Water (70:53 / 1988)

“Ground Water” is a collaborative meditation on inherited musical and linguistic representations of paradise, paternity and facism. Its exoskeleton is a series of seven non-representational portraits of everyday objects found or made in the same location, which, by virtue of their use and familiarity, have assumed a luminous quality. The resulting portraits, or accretions, became, during the compositional process, fields for interpenetrating fragments of history, narrative, memory, melody, myth, lost news, landscape, the pastoral, the lyric, old tunes, remembered voices, deceit, betrayal and yearning. «Ground Water» seeks out the cracks in the Walls around Paradise through which, if only for a moment, we might escape. The primary ‘geographical setting’ is an English garden house on Vancouver Island. During the 1930-40's, the name Social Credit referred to the political and economic theories of Major CH Douglas, of whom Ezra Pound, among others, was a disciple. The party symbol was a green cross on a white ground. MG/CB