ebbing ice lines (album)

2025
field recording album
sounds from the low arctic
published by forms of minutiae & Dinzu Artefacts
2xLP + digital

2025 was declared the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation by the United Nations, accompanied by the proclamation of March 21st of each year as the World Day for Glaciers, starting this year. As they put it, “this is an opportunity to raise global awareness about the critical role of glaciers, snow and ice in the climate system and the hydrological cycle, and the economic, social and environmental impacts of the impending changes in the Earth’s cryosphere.” To celebrate this decision, forms of minutiae presents a series of albums dedicated to glaciers and the acoustic multiplicity of the ice with field recording works by Marc Namblard, Ludwig Berger, Yoichi Kamimura, Cheryl E. Leonard, and Pablo Diserens

For the fifth and final album of this series, forms of minutiae teams up with Dinzu Artefacts to present ‘ebbing ice lines’ — a dronesque and geologically-rich journey through the Low Arctic’s melting zones by field recordist, sound artist, and forms of minutiae co-founder Pablo Diserens.



“In a small water-filled crevasse amid the ash-laden, crystalized expanse of Sólheimajökull, a gurgling voice bridged the past and the present in fizzing strings of time-traveling air. Sounding its earthly memory, the glacier released bubbles carrying remembrances of the epochs it had witnessed. Temporal multitudes and a rich existence materialized in its melting. Echoing the animated nature of its jumbled body, the glacier kept growling in bizarre and humorous expressions while losing the particles that formed its skin. It vibrated in an ebullient tongue bristling with lingo. Ambiguous laughters, long laments, sudden regrets, visceral cries, circuit simulations, avian mimicking. This body held it all in a complex vocabulary, out in the open, as if it was grasping, digesting, its own state. And there I was, all ears, my hands on the ice, sharing the intimacy of a body ebbing in murmurs.” — Pablo Diserens

‘ebbing ice lines’ is assembled entirely of field recordings made by Diserens on three trips to the Low Arctic – twice to Iceland and once on a self-guided residency with friends and colleagues Diane Barbé and Irwin Barbé at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in Finland, on the border with Sweden and Norway. Avian vocalizations, anthropogenic drones, geothermal pipelines, natural resonances, ice symphonies, geological shifts and volcanic eruptions are all characters in the drama of Diserens’ compositions, which like much of their previous work, leans into the smallest details of sound to provide connection and transmission across multiple species, scales and subjectivities.

Glaciers are often spoken of as archives – frozen repositories of water, trapped air, rock and organic matter containing atmospheric information about the history of the planet. For many, Julie Cruikshank suggests in ‘Do Glaciers Listen?’, they have existed as “eternally frozen, safely distant, and largely inert”. And yet, as the planet warms and awareness of their melting increases, these vast tongues of ice have taken on new meaning, becoming “a new kind of endangered species” - or, what Cruikshank calls “a cryospheric weather vane for potential natural and social upheaval.” The sound of melting ice has become shorthand for a climate grief foretold.

On ‘ebbing ice lines’, Pablo Diserens steps between the extremes of these imaginaries and invites us not to think of the glacier simply as a container of environmental history or human emotion, but as an entity in its own right. Not beholden to its melting edge or calving frontier, Diserens heads for the interior to hold a stethoscope to the glacier’s gurgling guts. We feel its metabolism rise and fall, its arteries flow and its lungs exhale. Time and again over the course of the album’s eight distinct tracks, I find myself in an almost uncomfortable intimacy with a body far greater than my own.

It is fitting then that we begin on Sólheimajökull, a glacier in southern Iceland that is believed to be losing 60 metres a year to rising temperatures, dissolving thousands of years of freeze in a second of melt. As water-filled crevasses release air bubbles in a series of pops, bursts, and cracks on ‘melt morphemes (supraglacial)’, the sound we hear is of a millennia transformed into a moment, slow accretion rendered as spectacular event. It’s hard not to interpret these sounds as codes, forms of communication, or vocabulary, which in a sense, they are. "What happens,” Diserens asks, “if we shift our perspective and sense of scale to embody that of a glacier?"

What is interesting about this proposition is that it lifts the burden of interpretation from the sounds themselves. Whatever the language of the glacier and the ice is, it is not simply for us as humans to understand. ‘ebbing ice lines’ is not a eulogy. In fact, like the title track, underpinned by vessel drones from the Lyngen fjord in Norway and squeals of drifting ice on Lake Kilpisjärvi in Finland, these sounds are often strangely oblique. The “incredible magnetism” of hums and drones that Diserens describes as “site-specific music”, the vibrato of rock ptarmigan calls, and the swirling cacophony of marine birds prey on the animal inside us, an undertow of recognition that something is not right in our Low Arctic lands.

‘ebbing ice lines’ intervenes in a context where warming climate is altering ecosystems and opening up naval and trade routes across long frozen seas, and Arctic tourism continues to increase exponentially. As the title suggests, there is a receding line beyond which ice can no longer form. And yet, the primary purpose of ‘ebbing ice lines’, and indeed Diserens’ work more broadly, is not to warn in the conventional sense, but to create bridges of understanding through sound that provide routes for us to be more present to that which surrounds us.

Listen to ‘world in the process of making itself’, featuring recordings of Krafla’s acidic mud pools and fumaroles, and Mo Zeisner’s recordings of the Fagradalsfjall volcanic eruption in Iceland, and it’s impossible not to hear in its flesh-like sounds a kinship of matter between the geological shifts and organic, bodily processes. By the time we return to ‘melt morphemes (proglacial)’, I am so primed to feel the presence of living beings in my midst that for a moment I am convinced that these underwater recordings of ice growlers in the proglacial lakes of Svínafellsjökull, Fjallsjökull and Breiðamerkurjökull are those of a forest canopy, or even the sound of human breath, unsettlingly close against the microphone and sending a shiver up my spine.

The album ends with ‘mapping moulins’ and back on Sólheimajökull, the Icelandic glacier whose murmurings we encountered on the first track. Now though, we are above the surface, treading carefully with Pablo between gaping moulins, crevasses and glacial streams, listening vertically down through the ice, both at one with and apart from its astonishing diversity, before the surging rivulets fade out into a prescient drip, drip, drip.

It is only too human then to try and find analogies or metaphors for processes we cannot control or perspectives we cannot access. The drone as presage, the melt as ticking clock, the ice as archive, the glacier as body. Tempting as it is to hear meaning, the invitation Diserens extends is not quite so direct. Stop, listen and pay attention to the cryosphere and how it makes you feel. Hear the veil between you and the ice thin, sense your own porosity, and let your edges dissolve. Everything else will flow from there.

— text by Anton Spice



> 2xLP and digital editions available for purchase on forms of minutiae ︎︎︎

> “ebbing ice lines” is the fifth album of forms of minutiae’s ice series which is part of UNESCO & WMO's Art for Glaciers Preservation: www.un-glaciers.org/en/art ︎︎︎

> Interview with Pablo Diserens for Through Sounds ︎︎︎



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DETAILED TRACKLIST

1. melt morphemes (supraglacial)
glacier calving and underwater recordings of air bubbles released by small crevasses on the surface of sólheimajökull

2. ebbing ice lines
rock ptarmigan, boat hums in the lyngen fjord, drift ice squeals, black headed gulls, kittiwake, and other birds


3. how much space do you need?
interview with vilmundur þorgrimsson (gallery freevilli)

4. non-night over pseudocraters
geothermal pipeline hums, flagpoles, arctic terns, common snipes and other birds by the volcanic lake mývatn

5. world in the process of making itself
fagradalsfjall’s volcanic eruption and lava, and krafla’s acidic mud pools and fumaroles

6. basaltic reverie
fumaroles, weather station vibrations, golden plover, and eurasian whimbrels

7. melt morphemes (proglacial)
underwater recordings of ice growlers in the proglacial lakes of svínafellsjökull, fjallsjökull, and breiðamerkurjökull

8. mapping moulins
glacial moulins, resonances, streams, melt, and crampons on the surface of sólheimajökull


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REVIEWS + AWARDS

Two of the album’s tracks were nominated for the following awards:

> mapping moulins (fka. walking on sólheimajökull glacier) nominated for Phonurgia Nova’s Field Recording / Soundscape Award 2023.

> melt morphemes (supraglacial) (fka. gestures of thaw (supraglacial)) nominated and highly commended for Sound of the Year Awards (2022) : “Sound of the Year" and "Disappearing Sound" categories.


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CREDITS

duration: 60:04 • 2xLP gatefold • limited edition of 300 • recorded, composed, and photographed by Pablo Diserens
sounds from the Low Arctic : recorded in Iceland, Finland, and Norway between 2018 and 2023
recordings of Fagradalsfjall’s volcanic eruption on "world in the process of making itself" by Mo Zeisner
words in "how much space do you need?" by Vilmundur Þorgrimsson (gallery freevilli)
text by Anton Spice • title "world in the process of making itself" quoted from Ursula K. Le Guin's "Left Hand of Darkness"

special thanks to the glaciers, geologies, and animals of the Low Arctic, Corinne Diserens, Clément Coudeyre, Diane Barbé, Irwin Barbé, Kilpisjärvi Biological Station, Mo Zeisner, Vilmundur Þorgrimsson, Kría Daniels, Ásdís Kalman, Daníel Niddam, Jonáš Gruska & LOM, Joe McKay, Ludwig Berger, Mathieu Bonnafous, and Madelyn Byrd.

mastered by Mathieu Bonnafous
design by Pablo Diserens

in celebration of the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation (UNESCO & WMO, 2025)
sound recording trips and research funded by Berlin’s Senate Department of Culture
project supported by LOM via the LOM+you program
published by forms of minutiae + Dinzu Artefacts
fom19 + dnz118 • 2025

ebbing ice lines (installation) 

2024 | March 8th → May 26th (Jihlava, CZ)
exhibition at IGLOO, Vysočina Regional Gallery
sound installation

Ebbing Ice Lines of the Low Arctic is a quadraphonic sound installation that investigates the soundscape of the Low Arctic’s melting zones and the life they foster. By weaving glacial gurgles, thawing squeals, avian vocalizations, hydrophonic acoustics, and site-specific hums, the composition sheds light on the minute sounds produced by these environments as they retreat under warming climates. Recorded in Iceland and Finland, these animal and melting voices tell a story of disappearance. The title plays with the existing tree line terminology—the edge past which trees do not grow—to imagine ebbing lines beyond which ice can not exist.

As they snake across latitudes, these lineations form vulnerable ecotones, gateways towards polar crystalline waters, ramparts teeming with sounds. Here, enveloped by terns’ shrills and rock ptarmigans’ clucks, the ice exudes peculiar guttural sounds. It squeals as its prismatic contours rub against one another, echoing the animated nature of its jumbled body. It growls as it releases strings of air trapped beneath glacial skin for hundreds of years. As the bubbles murmur and swim towards the surface, the Earth’s old atmosphere carries its history back into the winds. Ice is a vast expanse of earthly memory, a trickling archive spreading over eons. Far from forming sessile architectures, this planetary reservoir is in constant flux, in perpetual momentum, withdrawing from the globe in acoustic multitudes. Frozen drifts, azure crevasses, glacial streams, dripping crests, and gapping moulins all vibrate with ebullient tongues—a voice of some sort, a gestural diversity, which images hardly convey. Yet if we listen, glaciers and thaws bristle with sonic vibrance—a discreet phenomenon that speaks volumes.

> shown at Vysočina Regional Gallery‘s IGLOO sound gallery (08.03. — 26.05.2024) ︎︎︎
> curator: Miloš Vojtěchovský