Should I ever have the means to travel the world, I would do so in a heartbeat. I long to experience the food and culture of diverse places, to feel the vibrant cities and rural serenity of our amazing planet. Though I am of two minds about the approach, the journey would be as incredible as the destinations, and perhaps there is a balance nestled between these desires. One is to follow in the footsteps of Anthony Bourdain, the culinary and cultural vagabond, gone too soon, but adored by millions. The other mindset that drives my fantasies is from Sir David Attenborough, a man so thoroughly recognized that he is considered a national treasure of Great Britain for his ability to write and communicate about the wonders of the natural world in his record long career as a nature documentarian.
I grew up going camping often and lived surrounded by a small wooded area. I loved hiking around the woods and finding snails by the creeks. I grew up and settled in more urban environments spending most of my life in the hospitality industry training my palate with different food and beverage experiences. I suppose the common theme here is exploration; which is the total theme of Glåsbird‘s latest release, A Sonic Expedition.
A Sonic Expedition is a compilation of tracks from the composer and ambient artist Harry Towell (previously anonymous) whose Glåsbird project has largely focused on albums soundtracking environs that Towell has not been to. Instead, from the comfort of his own home, he devoured documentaries, studied maps, read books, and spent hours on Google Earth (also a pastime of mine) to inform each album release. A Sonic Expedition seeks to take the listener on a global journey by selecting two pieces each from the eight album trek across the world. This is a long album, not as long as it would take to journey the globe or listen to eight other albums, but it is well-distilled and gives a sense of space and time as we travel from pole to pole.
The first two steps of this journey put us in the North Pole via Greenland. Warm, but sparse strings with little icy twinkles of piano and synths move like a slow motion drone shot over a glacier. Just as patterns in the ice begin to emerge, new twists emerge giving a sense of vast emptiness and deep, cold beauty. As we move through the cold, we find ourselves in Svalbard, welcomed with a little sunnier disposition and a little more warmth from the synths and piano. The snows are still cold, but there is a soft peacefulness to the aurora borealis lit nights.
Our next visit takes us to the fjords of Norway. These selections feel immediately more lively mimicking waves crashing on rocks, rhythmic guitar strumming like the sound of lapping water while flutes and synths carry the wind. “Grønnefjord” is one of the most lively tracks on A Sonic Expedition with its chopped and looped guitar and deep textures that drone in the background. It feels like the jagged terrain of eroded stone and the bustling rhythms of a port town.
Here, Glåsbird takes us to a more somber location and soundscape, as we explore Novaya Zemlya. This archipelago in northern Russia is also full of fjords and glaciers, wildlife, and people, but was also famous as a Cold War airfield and test site. Most infamously, it was the test site for the largest thermonuclear weapon ever created and tested. Tsar Bomba was an arial bomb tested there in 1961. The casing of radioactive material was actually reduced from uranium 238 to lead to create less fallout, but this also reduced the destructive capabilities. Nevertheless, the bomb was measured at 50 megatons of TNT. The most powerful US bomb at the time was 15 megatons. One of the codenames for Tsar Bomba was ‘Vanya’. Glåsbird offers a track that shares this name, absolutely oozing the gravity of the situation with harrowing string arrangements, somber, heartbreaking, and casting the weight of humanity’s most destructive urges in a single, perfectly executed soundtrack.
The enormity of this project begins to take shape as more than casual tourism. “Vanya” drifts out as “Last Ritual” picks up the sobering string arrangements and adds some hushed orchestral instrumentation as we venture into Siberia, the immensely vast and sparsely populated harsh North of Europe and Asia. The emptiness is felt in “Last Ritual” and “Thermokarsts” along with “Vanya”; these three tracks offer the most sublime and haunting tracks, easily at home in soundtracks to films like Come And See or Werckmeister Harmonies where the space in between the fringes of humanity at its most compulsive and damaging coexist with the harsh realities of the natural world.
The next pair of tracks sends us to the Himalayas, letting the majesty of the highest peaks in the world and the meditative inspirations of Tibet cleanse our fraught minds after the previous excursions. Notes of singing bowls and throat singing are replicated along with wind chimes and the silent still majesty of snow capped peaks.
Our next expedition takes us to the Pacific, starkly warmer and weirder than anything we’ve been through this far. These tracks give us electronic bleeps that invoke the sensation of reveling in a submersible through the mysterious depths with reverb and delays in rhythm sections before we hit Antarctica. These final two tracks are the longest each on the record, but in that, they are the most sonically complex. More subtle noise effects and layers of resonance, more grandiose and affecting in their execution.
This project is nothing short of epic. To attempt to soundtrack the world is no small feat. A Sonic Expedition not only distills the impressive body of work Glåsbird has produced so far into a much easier to digest compilation, but also documents his growth as an artist over the last several years as it is delivered chronologically as well as geographically. It has taken me longer than usual to digest this project. It’s depths and mysteries continue to unfold with each listen, every track an invitation to educate myself about the area of the world Glåsbird is exploring, and this is just the surface of his work. It is a bit hampered by the selection of mostly cold, vast, uninhabited places, but upbeat and lively aren’t hallmarks of ambient music anyway. Overall, this is a fascinating and lush journey that warrants more discovery, and hopefully the vastness of the world remains an inspiration for Towell’s future endeavors.
