Andy: Looking at the end of 2019 with a ‘wait and see’ attitude of gratitude. Rising sea levels, late-onset adulthood, love itself growing more complicated and unwieldy by the year – I came from Chicago US to Godalming UK to visit David Price et al. Instead of giving any answers to my questions, he just showed me around his quaint village which had recently been flooded by the Anthropocene. Genesis founder Peter Gabriel attended the elite school on the high ground above the town. David is a fan and told me about Gabriel’s song Here Comes the Flood which apparently imagines how the world would be if everyone was suddenly telepathic. I hope that’s on the other side of history. I’d like to see more of my friends. In your eyes…? There’s a tear in your beer.
David: Hanging out, looking, watching, making together… two friends, who always make a piece of work when they see each other, have made another piece of work. My son Jack, who appears in the video, loves Peter Gabriel, and Peter Gabriel went to school here in the little English town where I grew up, and where Andy came to visit for the first time in 15 or so years. We thought about his song Here Comes the Flood, and all our journeys down here from London were affected by unusual rainfalls, landslides and flooding. The river that runs through the town is higher and faster flowing than I’ve ever seen it. My parents live up on the same high ground where the school is. Andy and I took the words of the song down into the valley and commended the words to the fast flowing water. We toasted the meeting with a glass of water, ignoring our whiskeys. The water of life, but too much water. Our films always have our names in them. So?
Andy: The train from London to Godalming was very delayed, my memory is that there was a mudslide involving a train tunnel. When I arrived David and I immediately began a discussion on the collaborative work we’d make during my visit. David wanted me to listen to a Peter Gabriel song. But I was more interested in how way back when the singer was a schoolboy in an early version of the band Genesis, he and the others must’ve walked the same paths we were, all making plans for our creative futures. Winter in the South of England seemed like a deeply confused version of Springtime. On the flight home I contracted Covid-19 and became one of the first Chicagoans to have the disease.
David: This work was made just before everything changed for everyone/‘everyone’. The Christmas holidays of 2019 seem strangely innocent now, even though they felt slightly ominous at the time. The rising water levels we record in the work were only temporary, but will surely return. The grey, brown and green of the location seems exaggerated and swollen. It was almost two years until I returned to the same river, and two and half years until I wanted to go swimming there – which is now impossible due to some unknown pollution upstream. Andy and I haven’t seen each other in real life since – I hope we do so before long. Peter Gabriel is going back on tour soon. Apparently the lyrics to ‘Here Comes the Flood’ don’t really refer to a disastrous aquatic event – he was remembering a dream he had about mass-telepathy, a flood of thought, although you would never guess this by listening to the song. I miss you! All of you. Let’s talk soon.
