Simon Fisher Turner — The Great White Silence(OST)
It would have been easy to phone in 2 hours of featureless wind sounds and uneventful "arctic ambient" drift, as many others have done. Thankfully, though the music does stay sparse and right at the threshold of hearing, the album turns out to be far from the most glacially slow or 'empty' feeling I've heard. The typical air sounds are here, but they are used primarily as a tone-setting backdrop for a rich, multi-leveled narrative, ever-changing and drawing from many realms of sound and music. The emptiness of Antarctica is explored, but Turner periodically draws the listener's thoughts back to humanity.
There is a clarity of purpose and careful orchestration here that is very classical. Turner has a love for hypnotic arpeggi and ostinati, less restless and complex than Philip Glass but with the same crystalline purity of texture and harmony. They form the backbone of most of the movements here, enshrouded with field recordings and shimmering distant resonances.
The fluid washes of synthesizer are embellished with acoustic timbres and instruments at just the right moments. The most jarring instant in the piece is when the silence is suddenly and violently broken by the dissonant sound of piano strings being strummed from inside the piano, only to break into a bright, clear stream of heady jazz-inflected notes. Later, a wistful rhodes line provides the climax of the soaring, blissful upper atmosphere traversal that culminates disk 1. The actual end of the piece is a dirge-like alternation of chords from a muted harmonium.
Turner has a remarkable ability to find the emergent tonalities of nature's gestures: the snow settling, the water rushing. Sections often begin with hushed desolation, broken only occasionally by a small avalanche or soft droplets of rain. Turner carefully adds liquid electronic textures in such a way that before long the listener in bathed in a tide of drone that resonates in unique harmony with the nature around it.
The 10-15 minute movements are distinct and often separated from each other by a minute of near-complete silence, so it would've been easy to add track dividers, but I certainly appreciate that the experience should be unbroken. This album is remarkably listenable for being 2 hours long. I find myself listening to its entirety quite often.
My favorite part is serene opening 20 minutes of disk 2, which follow the extended metamorphosis of a warm, filtered percolating synth sequence, not unlike a more patient Biosphere, who uses similar, who uses very similar shimmering synth sounds and hypnotic melodies as found on this album, but generally makes shorter, less purely ambient tracks, with one foot still in the realm of techno.
Like punctuation points amidst the protracted sections of minimalist beauty, scratchy historic recordings of "old-timey" banjo music are peppered throughout the soundtrack. This thickens the atmosphere considerably, as does an extended segment in which the only sound is a faint opera singer's voice struggling in vain emerge from a rippling watery murk. There is also a lone sample of one of the original members of the expedition, very intense to hear - the cold around his voice is palpable even without any video!
This soundtrack is a masterpiece of ambient and minimal music, which should be equally accessible to both fans of modern classical and more intuitive soundscapes like Steve Roach and Robert Rich. There is so much to discover on this double album, which is truly like no other. I highly recommend it to any patient listener. I am now very much interested in seeing the film, as well.