A Closer Listen
The invitation is simple: spend an hour immersed in the sounds of melting glaciers, and ask if they sound like living, endangered entities. The water flows like blood; the air escapes like breath; steam leaves like sweat evaporating from a body.
Starting on the spring solstice, Pablo Discerns‘ forms of minutia has been releasing albums in the ice series, honoring the United Nations’ declaration of 2025 as the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. ebbing ice lines is the fifth and final installment, released in conjunction with Dinzu Artefacts.
The trip begins at Sólheimajökull, nicknamed “The Shrinking Glacier.” While this tourist attraction in southern Iceland hosts many international visitors, it also has much to teach. Losing up to 60 meters a year, it may disappear by the end of the century. The ice bubbles that escape bring centuries-old information to the surface, dissipating in the open air. The fact that they sound like irreverent children or juvenile birds only adds to the sense that the glacier is speaking. Over the course of the album, Diserens will continue to travel around the Low Arctic, from Iceland to Finland’s Kilpisjärvi Biological Station, which borders Sweden and Norway, and everywhere hear the same story: we are losing a large species of friends.
Diserens extends microphones in order to amplify their voices: sometimes a quiet hum, other times a whisper, occasionally a roar. The drifting ice in the title track creates its own symphony, akin to a soft orchestra of abstract chimes. As rock ptarmigans join the fray, it is as if they are performing in concert, one that might never be replicated should the ice – and perhaps by extension the birds – are lost. When the ice falls silent, they seem particularly agitated, a perfect sonic prophecy.
“world in the process of making itself” literally covers different ground, beginning with the sound of mud pools and building to a remarkable capture of the Fagradalsfjall volcanic eruption. Might the land remake itself without us? If the Earth is an entity – as in James Lovelock’s Gaia theory – how much human violence might cause her to say “enough”? These sounds are reminders that climate change is not simply warming, but instability, the highs higher and the lows lower, the atmosphere screaming its plight through earthquakes, cyclones, and rising seas.
Apparent in all five releases of the ice series is the fact that the earth, even an angry earth, sounds sufficient and beautiful without humanity. Although it is a different, non-composed sort of music, one can be comforted in the fact that music will endure: peaceful ambience, vast drones, natural percussion and literal rock music. The album’s greatest moment arrives late in “basaltic reverie,” when the rising drone suddenly stops to reveal a single avian voice. For a moment, one receives this voice as the earth’s last witness, until other voices chime in, and one realizes that the crying bird is not alone.
In the closing track, the sounds of melting ice turn from a drip to a flow to a deluge. One can hear the sound of our future melting away. But Diserens wants us to think deeper and to feel deeper, to feel empathy with the glaciers themselves, not only as they relate to use, but as gorgeous beings in their own right, endangered, shrieking creatures whose cries are apparent now but may one day be stilled. The trapped bubbles freed from the ice speak one final time before joining the atmosphere. Will we listen to what they are trying to say? (Richard Allen)
Wed Nov 19 00:01:18 GMT 2025