Ghost Between Streams II
Ghosts Between Streams is a collaborative multidisciplinary work created by 2022 Freedman Fellow, composer, and trumpeter Tom Avgenicos. Inspired by Avgenicos’ daily walks through Stringybark Creek Reserve on Cammeraygal Country, Ghosts Between Streams explores the concept of solastalgia - the sadness felt at the loss or change of a beloved place in nature.
With an overarching environmental concern, Ghosts Between Streams explores the struggle between nature and urbanisation to create a vivid picture of the reserve's rich flora and fauna, now threatened by urban development. Weaving a tapestry of music, visual art, and dance, audiences are taken on a spellbinding journey brimming with emotional power and resonance.
Following the success of Ghosts Between Streams I (2023), the virtuosic genre-bending ensemble returns with its second iteration: a dynamic fusion of contemporary jazz, strings, and a powerful visual counterpoint which explores the environmental history of the ancient Coquun (Hunter River). The creative process involves processing over a hundred hours of Hunter River field recordings and archival footage through experimental audiovisual technologies.
The river itself becomes the central character—once a source of abundance, now simultaneously a channel for the world's largest coal exports and a living ecosystem struggling with pollution. Through music and image, we're invited to see Coquun as more than just a waterway—it's a mirror reflecting the tensions of modern Australia.
“Fortune favours the bold – and the Freedman Jazz Fellowship winner’s new evocative interdisciplinary work puts himself among them.” - Limelight Magazine
“The pleasure of discovering this music – unfolding so calmly, so secretly – will inevitably draw you back, because it remains, at its core, distinctly unexpected.” - bestofjazz.org
Supported by City of Newcastle 'New Annual Festival', Create NSW 'Creative Steps' and Awabakal Local Area Land Council (ALALC)
From me:
The second iteration of GBS focusses on the history of the Hunter River and the surrounding regions. We are exploring the impact colonisation and industrialisation has had on the environment and culture in these regions, through an abstract yet humanistic experimental approach.
Through layering archival and captured footage, distorted though real-time and audio reactive processes, and experimental gaussian splat workflows, my goal for this work is to follow the emotional framework so eloquently laid out by Tom’s composition for string quartet and his jazz ensemble Delay 45.