In The Last Rivers Song, Lloyd Godman presents a stunning series of black and white photographs that show the raw, natural, beauty of Clutha River (which flows from Lake Wanka) and Kawarau River (which flows from Lake Wakatiku, Queenstown) before the water was stilled with the filling of Lake Dunstan at the completion of the hydro dam at Clyde in Central Otago, New Zealand. The hydro dam was planned to provide power to an aluminium smelter at Aromana which due to protests never eventuated. In an age where rivers are increasingly under threat from development, it offers an emblematic, evocative portrait of a wild, free-flowing river that has been lost to hydro development. The publication includes a detailed introduction to the conception of the project and the technical challenges of producing large mural photographs (which are gold toned from gold mined from the very river itself) and were first exhibited at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. From photographic stop motion to time exposure the aura of the river is captured beyond human vision. Exhibited at the Marshall Seifert Gallery, to compliment the murals at the DPAG, was a series of smaller photographs, the Clutha Panels, which show the expansive mood of the river. The full suite of photographs is included in the book. Hyperlinks within the publication link to animated video using sequences of the photographs and an original soundscape composed by Trevor Coleman and Paul Hutchins to accompany the DPAG exhibition. "Water surges, sprays, foams, whirls, ripples and rests, framed by very black rock which, when devoid of detail cameos the textures of its movements. In other instances a chiaroscuro lighting throws forward rock surface, its water-worn texture combining in rhythmic counterpoint with the current. The mural works are more expressively extreme, and have a greater over-all movement, each work capturing a different mood, from candy-floss fibres of foam in mural five, to the bone-crushing torrents". Alastair Galbraith

Please note: This ebook has been specifically designed as an epublication and is optimized for viewing on Thorium Reader. Thorium Reader is the free EPUB reader of choice for Windows 10 and 11, MacOS and Linux.https://www.edrlab.org/software/thorium-reader/ In 1983, Lloyd Godman engaged in series of evocative photographs of the wild Clutha River which was about to be dammed and transformed into Lake Dunstan through hydro development in the ebook The Last Rivers Song. The Lake Fill Series marks the time a decade later, when the dam was complete, the flowing waters were stalled, and the lake began to fill. Godman engaged in two performance works and the ebook documents these. Lake Wanaka and Lake Wakatipu, Queenstown New Zealand feed the powerful rivers that flow to the new lake. Unlike most art performance works, the camera and process of taking photos was used not only as a means of documenting the performance, but as an integral part of the performance. Here the artist wired himself up to a motor drive camera in an underwater housing sitting resting in the rising water, and as part of the performance periodically touched two metal plats that fired the camera shutter. Brass metal artifacts constructed from found objects, and natural objects become part of the earth circuit the artist creates. He explores how, as humans we are part of this earth circuit. The sequence of photographs shows the rising water obliterating the vista of the landscape and lake. The last image in the sequence shows a blur of water that engulfs the scene and references a landscape lost to development. To augment this a series of earth circuit drawings and photographs of the brass artifacts are included.

From a "born storyteller" (Seattle Times), this playful and moving bestselling book of essays invites us into the miraculous and transcendent moments of everyday life. When Brian Doyle passed away at the age of sixty after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted readers who regard his writing as one of the best-kept secrets of the twenty-first century. Doyle writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the sanctity of everyday things, and about love and connection in all their forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon. At a moment when the world can sometimes feel darker than ever, Doyle's writing, which constantly evokes the humor and even bliss that life affords, is a balm. His essays manage to find, again and again, exquisite beauty in the quotidian, whether it's the awe of a child the first time she hears a river, or a husband's whiskers that a grieving widow misses seeing in her sink every morning. Through Doyle's eyes, nothing is dull. David James Duncan sums up Doyle's sensibilities best in his introduction to the collection: "Brian Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to quiet glories hidden in people, places and creatures of little or no size, renown, or commercial value, and he brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or heartfelt language to his tellings." A life's work, One Long River of Song invites readers to experience joy and wonder in ordinary moments that become, under Doyle's rapturous and exuberant gaze, extraordinary.

This book engages with the question of how music expresses and responds to the profound existential disturbance that death and loss present to the living. Singing Death ranges across genres from medieval love song to twenty-first-century horror film music. Each chapter offers readers an encounter with music as a distinct way of speaking or responding to human mortality. The chapters cover a wide range of disciplines: musicology, ethnomusicology, literature, history, philosophy, film studies, psychology and psychoanalysis. The collection is accompanied by a website including some of the music associated with each of its chapters.

James Babb imbues his devastating wit, ornery perspective, and musical language within each of the ribald tales in River Music. This is exemplified in the “Prelude,” his opus about “the occasional laugh, the occasional thought, a bit about fly fishing and a bit about Life, and all of it underpinned by the music of rivers.” The pieces are arranged in a harmonious current that carries us through the seasons, and life itself. He recounts a disastrous--and hilarious--spring canoeing trip with a friend in “The Darling Buds of May,” where the snow accumulated so quickly on their hats that they “looked like Conehead voyageurs from Remulak.” In “The Coriolis Effect,” Babb rhapsodizes about the sights, smells, and culture of what he considers to be the last great place on Earth, where pristine Chilean waters and a native way of life relieve him of an obsession about which direction the water flushes. And in “Little Jewels,” he weaves an exquisite, deeply humorous, and haunting nocturne with peccadillo accompaniment that considers the mating habits of trout and men, mortality, and a thirty-nine-year-long unrequited love. Babb is a maverick whose latest offering is a true departure from conventional essays on fly fishing, or on any subject, and will be relished by the growing circle of Babb fanatics everywhere.