Andrée Greenwell — Music

It conjures up images of storming nights, the occult, hauntings, and everything else in between. If you walk a little along the dark side, you’ll have found yourself drawn into the stream of this poetic and imaginative underworld.

I for one found nothing more delightful than a late afternoon of music inspired by the Gothic; namely stories and imagery conveyed by words and sounds that evoke feelings that excite and terrify us. Gothic is brought to us by experimental music maven, Andrée Greenwell, whose arrangements and compositions of such varied works of the dark-kind delight and scintillate.

It began with the death of the young wife of Victorian Gothic poet, Edgar Allan Poe in Annabel Lee, a whimsical poem of death and the sea, and wonderfully brought to life through the visual design and animation of Michaela French. French’s beautiful and hypnotic animations, which were projected onto three arched windows, are a Gothic architectural throwback that served as a perfect visual world to fall into as the music played.

We quickly leaped into a modern transformation of the Gothic in an arrangement of The Cure’s A Forest, an atmospheric piece of the Gothic rock band that draws the listener into the dark. We steadily moved deeper into the morbid world and the added vocals of the operatic Jessica O’Donoghue contributed to the sense of drama. The pieces chosen are starkly different, yet completely cohesive when assembled together by this talented group of musicians which included Andrea Keeble and Kyle Morrigan (on violins), Joshua Stilwell on viola, Noella Yan on cello and David Trumpmanis on electric guitar and on-stage audio.

The Birds, a short story of Daphne du Maurier’s and later known for its Hitchcock grandeur makes for a screeching segue into Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, a most beloved revival of Emily Brontë’s book of the same name. O’Donoghue performs the piece in a far more sombre manner and it is here that I was hoping for the pitch of Greenwell’s voice to soar instead.

Gothic took off suddenly from the ethereal into a far more disfigured terrain with Chosen, written by Maryanne Lynch and Andrée Greenwell, which bases itself on the entrapment of Kerstin Fritzl, whose walls were her world until she was 19. This progresses to the seedy world of a suicide at a motel with Death at the Beach Motel, focusing on the death of artist Brett Whiteley. The feel of this piece takes on a more Southern Gothic feel of urban decay.

Swiftly back into the land of goose bumps, all forms of Nosferatu and night creepers were projected in snippets of film as the troupe performed Thriller. And finally, after all the excitement I was glad to return to the ethereal with Edgar Allan Poe in The Bells, capping off with the strange beauty of the theme from Twin Peaks, a work by film composer Angelo Badalamenti and performed to perfection by the troupe.

Badalamenti’s Fallen was the perfect closure to the evening, giving me the sense that I’d woken from a dream. Gothic was exactly what I always wanted and never thought to envisage. Thanks to Greenwell and her team, I was able to say my cravings for Poe and Twin Peak binges had at last made sense: I am of the Gothic kind.

Gothic was performed 25 November 2018 at Arts Centre Melbourne.