I FIRST met musician, composer and artist Erland Cooper outside London’s Barbican Centre in late spring. He had been standing for 12 hours next to his 2.4-metre-high ice sculpture, Glacier. This thawing, crystalline monolith reflected the climate change themes and fragile beauty of his fourth-and-latest album, Folded Landscapes.
“It was a kind of slow protest… a gentle way to bring conversations together,” explains Cooper when we next meet, some months later. “I love that people just came up and sat beside me, picked at it, talked about it.”
We are now in Cooper’s basement studio, where another ice block looms amid his collection of digital technology and vintage synthesisers. The ice contains frozen hydrangea and thistles, plus a channel designed to hold a hydrophone mic, used to capture underwater audio – its drip-drip melting forms a rhythmic backdrop to our conversation.
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Cooper’s work is imbued with child-like wonder, but also a lingering, worldly reflection. Does he consider himself an activist-artist? “I don’t like to be divisive. I like people to come up with their own views and engage in conversation rather than make statements,” he says.
“And this is an opportunity to celebrate and cherish the natural world. [Musician/artist] Brian Eno said art has the ability to make you feel something. Generally, when you feel something, you make changes. Music is a really good catalyst for that.”
Folded Landscapes emerged through Cooper’s typically playful experiments. Its seven movements were recorded with the Scottish Ensemble chamber orchestra, across temperature shifts spanning the sub-zero and a sweltering studio, with the audio master tape exposed to the elements and sun-scorched on 19 July 2022, the UK’s hottest day in history.
“I took these incredible virtuoso musicians into a factory in Glasgow and recorded them in sub-zero temperatures,” he grins. “They all had fingerless gloves and big jackets, and were just beaming, because it was something different. It was a process to really get under the fingernails of rising temperatures. The first one to four movements are austere, a steep glacial ascent. Then it’s a toboggan ride of hope down the other end.
“Over the seven movements of thawing, the fidelity of the audio is getting worse, but the music arguably becomes more hopeful. There’s this kind of Scottish classical ceilidh on the sixth movement, and I’ve fond memories of sweating in the studio as they were vigorously playing.”
The album also features guests such as UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, while its heady fifth movement samples familiar voices, including Greta Thunberg, alongside a 1970s news report delivering very similar ecological warnings. “That moment is not about those personalities, it’s actually just about noise – that echo chamber of opinion, which can be quite antagonistic,” says Cooper.
Secret soundings
He delights most in “the magic of the everyday”, whether it is around his London flat or his birthplace of Orkney in Scotland, which recurs throughout his work, including an earlier triptych of albums. Cooper and his siblings were raised by scientist parents. While he never studied music, at weekends he would sneak into the school where his father worked to teach himself to play the piano and decipher tape machines.
“Science has always played a major role in this feeling of exploration,” he says. Increasingly, he has gravitated towards collaborative work, both with other people (in previous outfits including The Magnetic North and Erland & The Carnival) and with nature itself. “My music’s always got a sense of place,” he says. “How can I dig into the soil a bit harder?”
Cooper literally dug deep for another project, Carve the Runes Then Be Content With Silence, “planting” the score and the only tape of his first classical album at a secret spot in Orkney, with just treasure hunt clues to retrieve it.
After a year and a half marinating in the soil, the tape was finally unearthed by two fans and is currently being displayed on a “drying out” tour across UK independent record shops. It will be premiered as part of a in June 2024. In an on-demand era, it feels radical to really wait to experience something. “This memory of something suddenly became the most precious thing,” says Cooper.
His latest release, in May, was a piano version of – this time applying the echo captured in Norwegian glacial caves to the elegantly minimal melodies. Here, he uses impulse response data (in this case, the reaction of a dynamic environment in relation to external change) collected from Svalbard by a team of European scientists for their own studies measuring the diversity of acoustic climates, which depend on the morphology and dimensions of the caves. Cooper recorded his piano using an ice-encased hydrophone, trying to gauge how the ice “hears” music.
“Instead of taking the piano to a glacial cave in Norway and recording there, could I take the reverb of the cave and bring it back to my studio? Technology allows us to do that,” he says.
One of the scientist team, Pawel Malecki, sent me an email expressing his delight at being contacted by Cooper for this album. “This isn’t the first time someone has shown interest in our impulse responses, however, Erland’s idea undoubtedly stands out for its uniqueness and creativity,” he wrote. “Using the acoustic properties of caves for producing music adds a level of immersion and symbolic connection to the caves.
“Above all, I’m thrilled that the acoustics of northern environments are gaining attention. Our work has primarily been of interest within specialised scientific circles. Now, with projects like Erland’s, a broader audience will get to experience and appreciate the captivating acoustics of the Svalbard glaciers and caves.”
For now, Cooper sets up the hydrophone and sound desk – and that is how I end up reciting Shakespeare to an ice sculpture. When Cooper replays my voice – filtered through frozen water and Arctic cave echoes – it sounds coolly haunting, transformed into something or someplace else. “That’s a mic-drop moment,” he smiles. “Really, living with the natural world is a duet in itself.”
Arwa Haider is a writer based in London
