the well-tempered icicle: frozen minimalism and joik bass

@sumitsays: the well-tempered icicle: frozen minimalism and joik bass @somersethouse

So on Sunday I went to see Norwegian musician Terje Isungset playing one of a series of half-hour concerts on musical instruments made entirely from ice. The concert was in a geodesic dome on the Thames-facing terrace of Somerset House, just big enough to include a small stage, the mixing desk and a couple of dozen audience-members. I think numbers were also kept low to avoid heating up the instruments – they’re clearly finely tuned and even slight melting would probably erode their sound. To that end, there was an “ice roadie” who took them out of coolboxes only for long enough to play a particular song; none of them remained out for the entire concert. He was apparently the same chap who carves the ice out of a frozen lake somewhere in northern Norway and had driven the instruments all the way to London for the shows.


For this reason, and because photography was forbidden during the actual concert, I can’t show you what the instruments actually looked like. They were all percussion except for a large wide-mouthed horn: dangling chimes, a marimba and cylindrical ice hammers used to extract a variety of sounds from ice blocks. Apparently stringed ice instruments have also been played at ice music festivals in Norway and Italy, but none were in evidence at the show I attended. Most of these made the kinds of sounds that you might expect: ethereal, fragile and pure – at least once they had been amplified using what looked like highly directional microphones. But there was one big surprise: an ice block with a thin flap carved out of one side to make a resonator that emitted a booming bass that would have made any dubstepper proud.

As to the music, a number of the pieces were based around repeated melodic figures and wordless vocals, inviting obvious comparisons to Philip Glass et al. But there was also a more trip-hoppy number (on which the bass block was put to good effect) complete with sing-song rap – it might not have actually been joik, but it was suitably evocative of the far north. So was much of the concert, in fact, though it was hard to tell if that was because of the ambience, the music or (most likely) the combination of the two. The final piece, which drew on samples from previous performances and the afore-mentioned horn, was more abrasive – on the noisy end of the ambient spectrum, culminating in a inchoate roar – a dramatic climax to an appropriately impermanent musical experience.

Here’s a short documentary clip about the making of the instruments and the music – mostly not in English, but it doesn’t really matter. There’s also an interview with Insungset on Radio 4’s Today programme here.

Icemusicfestival 2010 from Icemusic on Vimeo.


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