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

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