Beneath the Surface

This project started because I was interested in the hundreds of towns around America that have been evacuated and then purposely flooded in order to make reservoirs. In many cases, the streets, the buildings, still exist underwater. When droughts happen, these town resurface and the people who lived in these towns often come back to see what's left of their old homes. To me, this was a very powerful image. I saw it as such a perfect example of the idea that "you can never go home again." As I started researching I kept finding all these different parallels between water and memory, between water and time, in mythology, psychology, physiology, in the great floods, and icebergs, in swimming pools, and ancient rivers. It began to feel like maybe the reason water kept appearing as a metaphor for these things, was because it spoke to a basic human connection between the two. That maybe somewhere in the nature of water itself, we could find the nature of the human mind. (((NOTE: This piece is a slight departure from my earlier work. The piece is written less as a monologue and more like a transom of ideas set to music that I've written for it. It's separated into 7 different sections, like tracks on a record, each with a different perspective on the relationship between water and memory. So to that extent it should be listened to more like a music album with narration instead of lyrics.)))

You can listen to Beneath the Surface online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Beneath the Surface is an episode from PHONOGRAPHY: Writing In Sound by Ryan Scammell.

This episode is 37:49 long.

This episode was published on Mar 31, 2009.

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