Listening Balcony
Sound Art Department

September-October 2024

Nina Perry
Melting Point (2009, 28’16”)
A Falling Tree production
Violin performed by Pete Cooper, Voice Julia Traustadottir
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4

Melting Point explores both the human experience and musicality of ice as it melts. This "composed feature" by Nina Perry (whose previous BBC productions include the acclaimed Sounding Post and Mirror, Mirror) explores the icy landscapes of Greenland, Iceland and the Highlands of Scotland through recordings of environmental sounds, interviews with people going about their day to day lives and gathered music that expresses cultural and emotional connections to the weather. The winter thaw into spring is a time most often associated with renewal and hope, yet paradoxically in light of climate change melting ice has taken on the more ominous connotation of disappearing ice mass and rising sea levels. Among the voices heard are an Icelandic writer, a Greenlandic fisherman, a drama therapist for whom an ice cube provides a telling metaphor and an ice-climbing fiddle-playing mountain rescuer from the Cairngorms. Their words are interwoven with spectacular recordings of the Greenland ice sheet as it calves and destroys and a specially composed musical soundscape to reveal the dichotomy and emotional resonance of the thaw.