Fissure
Jan 16, 2023, 08:59 PM
"Fissure is a piece of electronic music that incorporates synths, electric guitars, flute and drum samples, and a field recording of two icebergs colliding off Antarctica. I was drawn toward this particular field recording because of the intense and very dense rhythms produced by the two icebergs as they clatter off one another. I immediately started to imagine this cacophony emerging within a dense drone piece, the shuddering delay of synths and guitars giving rise to the almighty clattering of ice.
"I wanted to conjure up a sense of both space and dread, so drew on the musical structures and techniques of electronic composers such as Fennesz and Tim Hecker, carving out sonic space only to fill it with highly processed instruments and granular effects that decay certain pitches into the fuzz of white noise. The icebergs themselves come into the piece at around the halfway point. The music builds in intensity, then suddenly drops away for a second, and the icebergs finally appear alongside a distorted bass line. Initially I present the field recording as I found it - or a portion of it at least - and then later slow it down and remove a large selection of frequencies, making it less intense as the piece winds down into silence."
Colliding icebergs reimagined by Christopher McAteer.
Part of the Polar Sounds project, a collaboration between Cities and Memory, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). Explore the project in full at http://citiesandmemory.com/polar-sounds.
"I wanted to conjure up a sense of both space and dread, so drew on the musical structures and techniques of electronic composers such as Fennesz and Tim Hecker, carving out sonic space only to fill it with highly processed instruments and granular effects that decay certain pitches into the fuzz of white noise. The icebergs themselves come into the piece at around the halfway point. The music builds in intensity, then suddenly drops away for a second, and the icebergs finally appear alongside a distorted bass line. Initially I present the field recording as I found it - or a portion of it at least - and then later slow it down and remove a large selection of frequencies, making it less intense as the piece winds down into silence."
Colliding icebergs reimagined by Christopher McAteer.
Part of the Polar Sounds project, a collaboration between Cities and Memory, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). Explore the project in full at http://citiesandmemory.com/polar-sounds.