Antisana

This is about feeling that you don’t know enough to handle something properly. It’s built from samples of the opening horn blast, but what really interested me was the surrounding story: a group of explorers and botanists’ attempt to climb the active, glaciated volcano Antisana; they surveyed the forests up to the snowline, and the northern and western ice tongues, but were cut short when the snow bridge ahead collapsed and made the route impassable. 

I was particularly taken with a cut-off confession, an admission of some mistake almost but not quite captured on tape. It was most likely some small nothing, but it suggested the content of the song.

Excerpts from expedition tapes reimagined by Earthly Years.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds