Polar Music


This page aggregates sample of polar music. We're keeping the definition of that music as open as possible, just centered around the experience of living around the North Pole.

(alphabetized by artist, composition, organization, or whatever seems most important)

John Luther Adams, White Silence. Winter music: composing the North.

Arctic freeform radio

Bel Canto

Biosphere

Bjork

Patrick Carrebre, Inuit Games

Chants Rituels Des Nomads De La Taiga, compilation CD (via Jim)

Deathprod

Manfred Eicher's ECM label

Ensemble Polaris ("Canada's premiere Arctic Fusion Band")

Jan Garbarek: a tiny snippet (via Jane Love)

Glen Gould, Solitude Trilogy (The Idea of North, 1967; The Latecomers, 1969; The Quiet In The Land, 1977) (via Brian Lamb)

 Brian Lamb's Gould wiki

gusgus

"Iceman", Terje Isungset (all-ice instruments)

Inuit throat-singing: one directory

Inuit, 55 Historical Recordings: http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/1651

Inukshuk, (via Gordon Rumson)

Thomas Koner (via Matt Weber)

"Nordic Circle" program

Al Oster, Canadian country singer. nice WFMU post.

Pamyua

Polar Music record label: Wikipedia entry

The Saami people: one discography with samples

Polar musics from Smithsonian Folkways: to sample and purchase online

Sugarcubes

The Taima Project

Throat singing: on the many varieties of throat singing: International Association for Harmonic Singing

Tuva: Friends of Tuva

Wizard Women of the North, compilation CD (via Jim)

Erik Wøllo, Polar Drones and others


This topic began in March 2005, as a post on Bryan Alexander's personal research blog, Infocult. The very rich comment thread there was greatly helpful.

I (Bryan) am also drawing on content initially aggregated into a wiki page, which was deleted by its host. I should have backed it up and mirrored it better: lesson learned. Archive.org didn't have a copy, interestingly, as the host had blocked crawlers: another lesson learned. Google's cache, though, did have a recent copy, which I used to seed this one: still another lesson yadda yadda.

Allies and allied fellow researchers on the Web:

John Anderies' blog post

Hugh Blackmer's grand circumpolar page

Brian Lamb connects this with wikis and elearning

Seb Paquet's Webjay listing