LP/DL: f-o-m.bandcamp.com/album/ry-hy

2025 was declared the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation by the United Nations. To celebrate this decision forms of minutiae presents a series of albums dedicated to glaciers and the acoustic multiplicity of the ice. Following Ludwig Berger’s “crying glacier”, the series continues with its third album, “ryūhyō”, a delicate dive into Japan’s unique drifting ice presented here by sound artist and field recordist Yoichi Kamimura.

Recorded over four years, the album shares the intricate soundscape birthed by Ryūhyō, Japan’s drifting sea ice, in the Sea of Okhotsk by the coast of Hokkaido. Located on a similar geographical latitude as Venice (Italy) and Portland (Oregon) this is the northern hemisphere's southernmost region to see drifting sea ice. This unique phenomenon forms each winter as the Amur River’s freshwater mixes with the Okhotsk’s seawater and freezes. There, the serpentine stream morphs into a vast expanse of ice, blanketing the ocean. It descends south, carried by the currents, before engulfing the shores of Shiretoko, a UNESCO World Natural Heritage site. Here, drift ice plays a vital role in the thriving local ecology, as it releases nutrient-rich freshwater that fuels phytoplankton blooms, which in turn support a diverse range of wildlife, including fish, seals, eagles, whales, and more. Yet, year after year this seasonal ecosystem dwindles due to climate change, exponentially thinning Ryūhyō.

Thirty years ago, the ice was large and thick, allowing locals to walk and play on its surface. According to elders, when the ice used to fill the Sea of Okhotsk, it remained motionless like the ground yet it made a sound. Human-like whistles and breaths would emanate from the frozen horizon, a phenomenon referred to by locals as Ryhyo-Nari (drift ice noises). Each year since 2019, Yoichi Kamimura has attempted to record this sound, but today’s weakened drift ice no longer whistles, instead it shares a new set of guttural vocabulary.

Thanks to Kamimura’s recordings, Ryūhyō’s richness can be felt through sound. The ice accumulates in floating imbrications that rub against one another in squealing, crackling, and gurgling utterances. What emerges is a dense textural soundscape that bears the fascinating range of these melting voices. By blending aerial and underwater recordings, the album positions our ears between the floating ice fissures. In these squeezed spaces, sounds ebb and flow with the tides in bodily, grotesque, and whimsical swells, to the point of inspiring some of the track titles (such as “onaka no oto” meaning ‘stomach rumble’). But these icy screeches, snores, and gurgles are not the only sonic expressions here. Who else inhabits Ryūhyō? Across the album, multiple animal voices echo above and below the ice. In “shima-fukurou”, the frozen noise is cadenced by the ghostly call of a Blakiston's fish owl, one of the world’s largest and rarest owls, endemic to this region. In “kyūai”, the water beneath the ice houses an uncanny pinniped courtship: elusive ribbon seals songs filling the ocean with sinusoidal downsweeps — an otherworldliness that accentuates the peculiarity of this drifting soundscape.

In “ryūhyō”, Kamimura listens to the ice telling its own story, one of a coastline possessed by a gripping, yet thinning, sea ice. These recordings highlight the sonic intricacies of the drift ice and the abundance of its unique ecosystem while sharing its inherent vulnerability. Perhaps Yoichi Kamimura eventually did witness the strange sound that elders once called Ryhyo-Nari. It may be that, in time and heat, the sound transformed into a new voice, for Ryūhyō talks in many tongues.

yoichi kamimura - ryūhyō

“João Alegria is an essential figure in the Portuguese underground music scene. With a prolific career spanning over a decade, the guitarist – as he prefers to be called – embodies artistic commitment, resilience, and a deep devotion to crafting dark, experimental soundscapes. The numerous albums the Lisbon-based musician has released testify to a sonic vision akin to its object of study: unhurried and unperturbable, yet continuous and tempestuous."

— João Morado (Beats for Peeps, Cosmofonia, Jazz.pt)

“You paint for fame & status, I paint for freedom & awareness”, reads one of the vertical graffiti that Mr.Paradox Paradise painted on some Berlin building. Likewise, there is nothing in João Alegria’s art that is done with the intention of fame or likes. He spent more than a decade editing with recognition limited to the “community” of sound nomads. “I’ve been doing this for some time and I don’t have a very wide audience”, he admits. However, who knows, knows. And who knows, like it. João Alegria’s music is for connoisseurs. Perhaps that will always be the case.
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However, the unique contours of his art, combined with a stubborn aesthetic consistency and prolificacy, are the characteristics that simultaneously nest and vitalize it. The unconditional and obstinate way in which this “guitarist” – as he likes to be called – has created his work is a rare case of perseverance. His motivation? It’s not entirely explicit, but somewhere between the love of music and the physiological need to create lives the truth of João Alegria. If he lives because he breathes, he seems to make music because he has to live. One senses in his speech an inevitability of cathartic genesis that surreptitiously emerges between the lines like a figure wandering through the night.
João Alegria can also move through the shadows, but his music definitely points to the heavens, full of verticality” 

– João Morado (Beats for Peeps, Cosmofonia, Jazz.pt)

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artists are invited to produce sound topographies that point to specific (or imagined) environments.

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