Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

Riverside Theatres presents: A Green Room Music production

GOTHIC

with Andrée Greenwell, Jessica O’Donohue, David Trumpmanis and Ad Hoc Collective.

A concert of European, American and Australian musical gothicism – from ancient to contemporary times, featuring moving image design by Michaela French.

Eerie gothic songs and stories play out in this concert presentation, framed by three large ‘floating’ gothic windows, designed by co-producer, Neil Simpson. Across these, stunning motion graphics by London-based artist Michaela French, merge Australian and European landscapes, together with historic and contemporary imagery.

Andrée has scored Annabel Lee and The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe, alongside new songs to lyrics by Australian writers: The Birds (Hilary Bell) after Du Maurier’s short story; a Totentanz (Felicity Plunkett) inspired by the German medieval frescoes; Orpheus Song (Alison Croggon); Death at the Beach Motel (Hugo Race, founding member of The Bad Seeds with Nick Cave) about the heroin overdose of Australian painter Brett Whitely; and Maryanne Lynch has worked with Andrée on Chosen, concerning the detainment of Austrian Kerstin Fritzl by her grandfather, with her mother and siblings.

Covers of classic ‘gothic’ songs across history juxtapose Greenwell’s originals: Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, the German medieval hymn Maria durch ein’ dornwald ging, Schubert’s Erlking, the Cure’s A Forest, Rod Temperton’s Thriller, famously recorded by Michael Jackson, and Angelo Badalamenti’s theme Falling from the television series Twin Peaks. All this is linked, and at times undercut, by the sound design, including an inventive integration of the Joplin tornado Missouri, captured on iPad in 2012. An evocative sound design by Andrée Greenwell and David Trumpmanis frames all this.

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website

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