The world is passing away and so is its desire

Jan 15, 2023, 12:07 PM

“The World Is Passing Away and So Is Its Desire” is part of a soundtrack to the end-of-the-world horror film we are currently living in. In this scene, the polar ice shelves are stalked and devoured by a terrible beast, the embodiment of the human consumption driving climate change.

"I had two sources of inspiration for my piece, the first being the general fear surrounding the disintegration of polar ice, the effect on coastal areas and sea waters, along with the loss of human and animal life. In particular, I had recently been reading about the Thwaites Glacier and its Ice Shelf, which is part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. It is likely to collapse within the next decade due to climate change and when it does, sea levels will rise dramatically. It is hanging on by a thread, but is only part of the larger problem. 

"The second is the Native American mythology of the wendigo, which are monsters formed by gluttony, greed, selfishness and cannibalism. The wendigo is an emaciated, skeletal creature, making whistling sounds, and mimics human voices. It consumes and is never satisfied. The human that it once was is frozen inside where the heart should be-and the only way to free them is to kill them. It speaks to the darkest parts of humanity, and feels like what we have inadvertently become.

"In the theatre of my mind, I imagined a giant wendigo, created by collective greed, selfishness and denial, chewing up everything in its path- here, the ice of the poles. Our humanity, goodness and best intentions are frozen inside this monster of consumption, that is endless and unstoppable. The ice cries as the monster approaches, and its heartbeat stops as it is torn apart with only the wind remaining. The base sample (024 collapsing shelf ice) is utilised as both the sound of the heartbeat and as it is consumed at the end. 

"I would also like to mention that the sound of cries in the piece were made by the howls of wolves recorded from the Wolf Conservation Center in New York, which cares for Mexican grey wolves and red wolves, both on the brink of extinction by human hands. There are 186 and 8 remaining in the wild, respectively. 

"The title comes from the Bible verse John 2:17, which talks about the end of the world- as do the accompanying lines in the piece itself from “The End of the World” by American poet Archibald MacLeish- two different views of the end of things brought into the context of this piece."

Collapsing shelf ice reimagined by Gabriel Edvy.

Part of the Polar Sounds project, a collaboration between Cities and Memory, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). Explore the project in full at http://citiesandmemory.com/polar-sounds