This series of BBC podcasts are astonishingly lovely, oddly reverent, deeply frightening.
There are three, all conversations with the incomparable Andrew McGibbon and artists living in the Arctic:
- Artist Olafur Eliasson about his interest in ice, the loss of ancient arctic ice, his work Ice Watch and his retrospective at Tate Modern
- The Reindeer Poets: The poetry, song and yoiking of the indigenous Sámi people who live across the Western European Arctic — a region including Russia, Finland and Norway
- Frozen Music: The sounds and music of the ice, meeting the composers, musicians and indigenous artists in the Arctic region who use the ice to make music
All testament to the unique power of artistic comment on our uncertain future, made even more powerful as the planet was the “unspoken backdrop” to these programmes.
The words “oddly reverent” and “unspoken backdrop” are from Sean O’Hagen’s The Week in Radio in the Observer on 21st July 2019, in which he reviews Frozen Music.