Iceland's glaciers are melting. So muso Charles wanted to capture how they sound
while he still could. So, thanks heaps for chatting with us, can you tell us
about this very cool project? So this Iceland project got started
actually from a video that my mother sent me of some folks in Siberia
playing sheets of ice as hand percussion instruments. I was so captivated by the
sounds of these these ice sheets that made all sorts of different pitches - high
and low - that I thought, well, I want to record some ice.
And, what better place to record ice than, ... Ice-land. The Vatnajökull Glacier
is where we ended up going which is the largest glacier in Europe. We had
an awareness after doing a bit of reading that we would need professional
help to actually hike up onto to the glacier safely. This is kind of like
extreme sports but like extreme music making. A friend said to me afterward
that you know if you're wearing a helmet while you're recording something cool is
probably happening. And some very "cool" things were happening. Is there a trick, is
there a skill, to drumming on ice? I think the main technique is to listen to what
the ice wants to say and find where it's resonating in interesting ways or making
interesting sounds. I found this this tabletop that really play like a traditional
percussion instrument. Did your hands get cold?
One thing that I did was to to take the shorter more percussive sounds and
mapped him out to my drum set. I played the main beat of the song on my
drum set but I wasn't playing acoustic drums I was playing the ice sounds.
I wanted to have some things that very clearly sounded like like they could be
pieces of ice and then some were heavily processed and and transformed.
Like this sound.
So we crawled down into this ice cave and did some singing and
and it's it's pitched and it's processed in some kind of crazy ways so it may not
even be recognizable as a human voice. I pushed really hard to book a tour with
with someone who would take us to an ice cave because I thought the acoustics of
the ice cave would be amazing and how often do you get to, you know sit or
hang out in an environment like that. Within the track what is your absolute
favorite sound and what is the sound? We were always on a little bit of high
alert because our guide had told us that often throughout the day these large
surak's or enormous pieces of the ice tend to cleave off of some of these
cliffs - these, like, thousands of feet tall cliffs -
and we were not in anywhere near proximity that we would be in harm's way
if that were to happen but we would be able to see it from maybe a
quarter mile up the hill and definitely hear it. We reached the top of our hike,
the apex, and we're about to go into this little ice cave and we were all
standing there and it happened. It happens a couple of times as like a
punctuation, as like a top of the section. And now people can use that sound and
all the others which are available online.
I'm almost more excited about what other people will make from them as well I
think you know no one's going to make an identical piece of music. One of the big
motivations for this project was to use it as a vehicle to discuss climate
change and the importance as an artist, as a sound artist, of trying to make some
kind of sonic tribute to glaciers before they melt away and recede
totally into the ocean. One thing that I love about sampling and and about
environmental sounds is the ability to just close my eyes and listen to the
sound of a big piece of ice falling off of the glacier and echoing through the
valley and you know remember that moment. This project really made me think about
how what we're hearing can also capture something and capture a moment in time.
It's amazing what you'll hear when you when you stop and listen.