Genre: Field Recordings / Documentary

Track Listing:

01 Round Mountain
02 Taylor Glacier
03 Walking on Taylor Glacier
04 No Boundaries
05 Countdown
06 Cape Royds
07 A Model is a Cartoon
08 Castle Rock
09 I Don’t Have The Data



Sonic Antarctica is like no other release I have ever heard: it comes across like a documentary film without the visuals. Confused? So was I at first, but as it washed over me I fell in love with it.

The artist, Andrea Polli, travelled to Antarctica and there made many field recordings and interviewed any number of scientists. The album therefore unfolds, like any good documentary, with the artful juxtaposition of the wild natural environment and the thoughts and reflections of the scientists who conduct all manner of research in the Antarctic’s unique environment.

Thus we find ourselves immersed in recordings of the freezing and razor-sharp southern winds; out in the field with researchers on the barren ice and earth (the cold air almost snatching their words from their mouths); and hearing the sounds of local fauna such as penguins.

As with a conventional documentary, there is also music on the release, generally quite simple and atmospheric drone/ambient elements which drift through the mix sparsely but appropriately.

This makes for a curious experience – this is an audio CD in which the presence of music seems surprising or unusual! I enjoyed this inversion of convention and expectation.

Of course the really fascinating and brilliant part of this CD is hearing, in their own words and voices, what these frontier scientific pioneers of Antarctica have to say for themselves. Antarctica is a great place for weather research, geology, biology and especially climate change research (and I’m sure other disciplines too).

The impression that this release paints is that these researchers are a hardy and adventurous lot: stoic, humorous and committed whole-heartedly to the purest ideals of scientific research. These are people willing to spend vast portions of their lives in one of the most forbidding places on earth in order to advance human knowledge.

Thus I loved, for example, a geologist’s tongue in cheek explanation about how geology is the true prince of the sciences. With cock-eyed logic he claims to be able to reduce biology and even the ever-vaunted physics to being nothing more than addendums, appendices, to the true and overlooked master-science of geology.

It’s pretty hilarious to know that scientists, especially ones so devoted to their work, can make fun of themselves. In general society science is seen as such a serious, straight-laced, stodgy and boring business. Sonic Antarctica humanises these folk quite beautifully and I really enjoyed the contrast between the warmth of the interviewees and the frigid realm in which they work.

The real power comes toward the end of the CD, when researchers talk about politics and the science of climate change.

They express their dismay that all their hard work, their determination, sincerity and rigour, can be attacked, trivialised and dismissed in the political arena so easily and with so little concern for truth or consequence.

This is the telling point of this release: that here, in perhaps the coldest place on earth, researchers still feel the political heat for revealing the inconvenient truth of global warming.

It is really powerful to hear their personal perspectives on this issue because these are perhaps the only people on the planet who have a full appreciation of the problem.

I rather wish that every myopic legislator in the world were forced to listen to this release – it might just convince them to follow their conscience and the overwhelming evidence for once and not just obey the money of similarly short-sighted vested interests.

I am not sure who this album would appeal to and you certainly cannot treat it like almost any other release I’ve ever heard. However I feel much richer for having listened to it and I encourage you to check it out if my review at all piques your curiosity.