Ivar Grydeland & Henry Kaiser – In the Arctic Dreamtime (Rune Grammofon)

An icy soundtrack to polar exploration, In the Arctic Dreamtime offers a mythic set of guitar improvs from Ivar Grydeland and Henry Kaiser

In May 1925, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen took five crew members and two seaplanes towards the North Pole. They landed a few miles apart, at the northernmost latitude reached by anyone up to that time. But with one airboat damaged, Amundsen’s team worked for three weeks to create a runway, shifting six hundred tonnes of ice, living off one pound of daily rations. Finally all six members packed into the N-25 aircraft and made it triumphantly home.

January 2019 – two guitarists meet in an Oslo recording studio. One of them, Henry Kaiser, is also a scientific diver who has worked at Antarctic locations visited by Amundsen, including the site where his N-24 airboat became icebound. The other guitarist, Ivar Grydeland, is more an adventurer in sound, having worked among the likes of David Sylvian and Thurston Moore, whilst becoming a key figure in the Nordic fusion scene.

The duo set about recording some duets to accompany a Norwegian silent movie. As a test run they went with Roald Amundsen’s footage, Ellsworths flyveekspedition 1925, from his aforementioned trek. Almost two hours later the musicians laid down their instruments, having played along to the entire film without pausing. Thankfully someone remembered to press ‘record’. Five pieces with a playing time of one hour were chosen for release.

To watch Amundsen’s old reels is to marvel at the hardy, even foolhardy, nature of his gang. No one seems to be wearing gloves as they go about manual labour in gelid conditions. The planes are filmed being transported through churning waters, then assembled amid almost comedic antics. We see aircraft skimming over snowy expanses; a seal mother and her cub lured for hunting; gothic ice palaces – jagged and gargantuan with an almost sci-fi aspect; the crude handling of a dead polar bear; the men’s wind-burned faces. Everything is tinted with an eerie cobalt blue, or mustard yellow.

The responses of Kaiser and Grydeland to all of this are intuitive and often surprising. Some of the more tortured musical moments, for example, accompany mundane scenes of pre-flight preparation. Much better to project your own thoughts onto these granitic soundscapes. With all its rimy outbursts and improvs, it’s easy to hear this album as a lament for a region that’s warming at double the global average. Yet the music is far removed from Sigur Ros’s symphonic evocations of blue whales showering slow-mo droplets everywhere. You’d more likely hear edgy snippets from Arctic Dreamtime trailering The Handmaid’s Tale than The Blue Planet.

The soundtrack opens with “Roald Amundsen 1925” onto an all-consuming sense of whiteness. It’s hard to credit these wintry exhales as being purely the work of guitars, not a set of Klaus Schulze’s synths. Deeper into the piece, we get placid dronings set against a torrent of anguished skreaks – a clear case of polar opposites. Are these fretboard shrills the cries of melting ice caps? Howls of protest from the Inuit community, currently using video cameras to map Arctic industrial developments?

The glinting flurries of “Spitsbergen” recall The Durutti Column’s minimal touch, alongside any number of Nordic guitar bands like Lumen Drones, Skydive Trio and Exoterm. “To the North Pole” follows on, with a slow drift of muzzy feedback, frosty picking and bleak meditations. But if the album sets out in ghostly mistiness, then “N-25” maybe invites a sense of eternal darkness. Warped notes and harmonics meet a softly tolling chord that shrouds everything in stillness. The title track also brings nocturnal shivers, but eases into something more playful, mystical, even auroral. It shifts like a glacial mass, until a final burst of piercing and drilling fretwork sweeps this whole austere saga to a close. Perhaps it’s a keening elegy for Amundsen himself, who disappeared in a polar rescue mission for the airship Italia.

Beyond all its mystic frenzy, In the Arctic Dreamtime reminds us about the preservation of silent places, or slower paces. Most modern visitors go to the Arctic in search of such quietude and contemplation. This album should suffice for the armchair explorers among us.