Band:  Various Artists

Album: Cryosphere

Album Year: 2006

Label:  Glacial Movements

Genre(s): Dark Ambient/Isolationist

Website: www.glacialmovements.com

Rating: 8/10

Track listing:

1 CLOSING THE ETERNITY – Pulse of Iceilence (07:56)

2 NORTHAUNT – Crocker Land (08 :10)

3 THO-SO-AA – Cryotesk (09:33)

4 LIGHTWAVE – Proxima Thule (08:59)

5 TUU – Silent Writing (07:26)

6 TROUM – Giascei (11:57)

7 AIDAN BAKER – Beneath the Ice (10:16)

8 NETHERWORLD – KRYOS (10:14)

9 OOPHOI – Cold Sun (08:50)

Compilations are a difficult beast for the reviewer to tame sometimes, mostly being a collection many different animals each with their own traits and personalities but very rarely able to live together. Occasionally though one comes across a creative ecosystem where every element within cohabits with a striking and harmonious interdependence whilst retaining a strong and essential individuality. This album is one such and is the debut release from Italy’s Glacial Movements Records (run by Alessandro Tedeschi, creative force behind the NETHERWORLD outfit) and invites some of the finest artists working in the ambient/isolationist fields today to consider one of our last frontiers and most sensitive ecosystems: the polar extremities of this planet. Take the Antarctic for instance. What visions does it conjure to the inner eye? One automatically thinks of wordless beauty and monolithic icebergs floating in blue waters, ice white & fragile and where the only thing capable of capturing the essence is cliché, worn and devalued by overuse. Our first impression of a place like Antarctica is that of a land of motionlessness and monotonous stretches of trackless snow and ice with no distinguishing features, a land of eternal stasis, where nothing happens and where even the sun shuns the cold and declines to spread its beneficence for half the year.  The nine tracks on this album of natural sounds, cold electronics and treated acoustic instruments intends to change that perception, and the music’s liquid movements are frozen together into a unifying whole to create a sonic document full of both minute and space-filling sounds, microscopically shifting movements, fine textures and haunting atmospheres. The giants of dark ambient sound-scapes NORTHAUNT, THO-SO-AA & OOPHOI provide cold, sweeping and shivering ice-sculptures seemingly carved from the very landscape itself, dropping you into the crackling cold stainless eternity of the polar continent, with only a pale ineffectual sun to light your way and the distant unreachable mountains the only visual relief. CLOSING THE ETERNITY, LIGHTWAVE, NETHERWORLD & Martin Franklin’s TUU are quieter, more fragile and even colder affairs, leaving you to ponder a vast snowbound landscape and turning it into something vaguely menacing and uninviting, persuading you that you are an unwanted interloper and that it just wants to be left alone to evolve in its own glacial timescale without human interference. TROUM pushes the isolation even further, disorienting sounds emerging from snowblindness, microcosmic skitterings and macrocosmic crackings weaving a rich narrative of perpetual activity as icicles and icebergs shatter; the constant movement forever unwitnessed. You truly are at World’s End, where human feet very rarely tread and it is a privilege to be here; you are a transient invited guest, a mere spot of momentary colour in a universe of white – and once you leave the colour will be nothing but a hazy memory. Fragility and the timeless beauty of a world even rarer is the theme of AIDAN BAKER’S “Beneath the Ice”, a freezing underwater journey of half-light filtered through pristine white layers, spears of sunlight piercing the lightless depths playfully, occasionally picking out something alien and fleeting, bringing home the truth of how little we know about our own home planet. The story the album weaves entices us to explore and witness this place where humans but seldom come, holding us spellbound with its unrealised variety. Collectively this compilation is like the sonic equivalent of a written travelogue of a journey through the moods and hidden facets of the frozen ends of our world with each individual artist’s contribution a chapter devoted to some choice stop along the way and pointing it out for our deep consideration. More importantly, each of these ‘chapters’ complements every other contribution perfectly and without breaking thematic continuity to create a seamless whole.

A rare treat then – a compilation that holds together well both thematically and artistically and also has the added bonus of serving as a fine introduction to a new label. Mr. Tedeschi is to be applauded for his efforts.

-[S:M:J63]