MELT, a meditation on the meanings and memories of ice, is a series of seven music-films, a modular audiovisual song cycle which can be shown individually, sequentially as a feature-length speculative documentary, and concurrently as an immersive audiovisual installation sung to life by members of The M6 vocal ensemble, using ice core data, archival footage and sounds, images, and stories collected through fieldwork in Ilullisat, Greenland.
THANK YOU to those who have believed in this project! You are amazing.
MELT: The Memory of Ice, a meditation on the meanings and memories of ice, will be a series of seven music-films, a modular audiovisual song cycle which can be shown individually, sequentially as a feature-length speculative documentary or evening-length multimedia performance, and concurrently as an immersive audiovisual installation. MELT has received funding from the Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities Award, a DeCastro Research Award, a Faculty Fellowship from CU’s Center for Humanities and the Arts, as well as dozens of crowd-sourced donations, and the composition and post-production of this large-scale work is in progress.
Imagine darkness. Onscreen, a spectacular, relentless river of icebergs, interrupted by flash- collages of abstract color-field photographs, topographical drawings, human and animal portraits. A musical drone rich with glimmers of sound — melting ice, reindeer bells — rises through the beautiful glitch. Singers chant tales of skates and icebergs and the breaking rhythms of ice floes, and recite an endless tapestry of ‘ice’ words: the colors, myths, and memories of ice, its scientific properties, “ice” in a hundred different languages. The ice melts on: a kind of climate- change Koyaanisqatsi.
As I struggle to give my child the same intimacy with the wild I’ve enjoyed, I find myself fascinated by a primary element of climate change: melting ice. Imagining a world where ice is a distant memory; MELT posits itself as an archive of the beauty of ice and snow for future generations who have not experienced it. With spectacular aerial footage of glaciers giving birth to icebergs, visual portraits of Arctic locals, visitors and scientists, ambient music made from glimmers of calving ice and other Arctic sounds, and textual fragments of the scientific properties of ice, the hundreds of names for ice, and dozens of memories of ice sourced from interviews and oral histories sung by a a diverse group of singers, MELT will poetically evoke the experience of the north, acting as a powerful and emotional reminder of the physical immediacy of climate change.