Cheryl E. Leonard - near the bear

A Closer Listen

Today is the first day of fall, which means the air should be growing slowly colder in the Northern Hemisphere.  And yet, year to year, the air is growing swiftly warmer around the world.  This is the impetus for forms of minutiae‘s Ice Series, produced in association with UNESCO & WMO’s Art for Glaciers Preservation.  Now in its fourth (of five) installments, the series continues to underline both the beauty of glacial sounds and the threat of their extinction.

Cheryl E. Leonard has been involved in climate issues for years; much of this album stems from a residency in Svalbard in 2011.  The difference between this and prior entries in the series is the human element; Leonard shares not only field recordings, but the percussion of found objects such as bones and driftwood, as well as samples and scrapes from saws, boats, beakers and more.

We can imagine David Rothenberg relating to the opening piece, “moffet,” which features Phillip Greenlief on the “kelpinet, a tubular piece of dried bullwhip kelp with a saxophone mouthpiece attached to one end.”  The piece is meant to celebrate and imitate the sounds of juvenile walruses, and while not composed as a duet, one can imagine it as one.  This playful beginning highlights the carefree nature of the Arctic before the devastation of climate change, and shifts the focus from human to local resident.  One hears the waves, the kelp, the keening cries, and wants to be part of this holy experience.  “glugge” heads in two directions at once; Leonard records a ship’s propeller, symbolizing the intrusion of structure and sound, and yet without the ship, she would not have been able to capture these recordings.  One is reminded that the environmentalist’s goal is not to avoid nature, but to step lightly, to leave the smallest carbon footprint.  Leonard riffs on a created woodwind object, and the bells begin to toll.

“thresholds” is similarly metaphorical, reflecting the safety of a home in a storm; but what home is safe forever?  The crinkle of percussive objects sounds like early raindrops, recalling the scientists who saw climate change coming in the 1970s and were both lauded and ignored.  The winds begin to blow, gentle at first, Leonard adding her own breath.  Inexorably, the timbre grows foreboding. We have reached the threshold of the title; soon we will pass beyond it, to the point of no return.  In the end, only the wind and waves remain.

The longest piece, “mørketid,” imagines “polar night in a Soviet coal mining settlement.” The early rustles sound like snoring, the evening seeping into the cabin first slowly, then all at once.  There is great peace in the breath and the sounds that imitate breath.  One wonders at the sound of crickets, which seem to have been beamed in from a warmer climate, until this particular sample begins to loop back on itself.  Improvising on metal handrails, Leonard coaxes a ghost town back to life, if only to sound its death knell.

So what does it mean to be “near the bear?”  In one sense, Leonard is proclaiming that we are all connected, near the bear environmentally even if we are not near the bear geographically.  But in another, sadder sense, we are closer to the polar bear than ever, as these forlorn creatures drift ever southward on melting floes, searching in vain for vanishing food.  Soon we’ll need no more prompts to “get out in nature;” nature is coming to, and for, us.  (Richard Allen)