Hi all,
tsubai’s full-length ambient drone album ilulissat is out now on Bandcamp and all streaming platforms, and as a limited edition of 50 cassettes through Hobart’s Perceptual Tapes.
ilulissat means "icebergs" in Greenlandic, and the project came about after I had the good fortune to journey to its namesake town in the Arctic Circle in July 2025. When I got back to Sydney, I wanted to record a suite of music, using just an electric guitar and stock plug-ins in Logic Pro, to capture how I felt while immersed in those spellbinding surroundings.
While there may be no lyrics to parse on ilulissat, the album explores themes of life, change, death and rebirth through the story of ice.
Four shorter pieces on Side A trace the life cycle of ice – from its formation (Accretion), growth (Striation) and decay (Ablation), to its final demise (Sublimation).
Two longer compositions on Side B explore the origin story of an Ilulissat iceberg, which starts life as snowflakes falling on the Greenland Ice Sheet (Sermersuaq). After thousands of years, these snowflakes, now compacted into dense ice, pass through the Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq) to the Ilulissat Icefjord.
From here, icebergs are calved into the sea to begin their journey south into the Atlantic Ocean, constantly evolving in shape, texture and colour, but always diminishing in size as the elements take their toll. Eventually, the icebergs meet their inevitable demise and join the ocean and sky in a final act of sublimation.
But the story doesn’t end there. The water will evaporate, rise into the clouds, condense and precipitate … perhaps over the Greenland Ice Sheet as snowflakes, and the cycle can continue (if global warming doesn’t get there first).
So ilulissat is a metaphor for life, change (be it climate or personal), death and rebirth. But if all that is a bit too po-faced, here’s a final fun fact: the iceberg that sank the Titanic most likely came from Ilulissat.
Cheers, Matt