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‘Seeing climate change like this, it changes you’: dance duo Bicep on making a new project in Greenland

Collaborating with Indigenous artists and sampling melting glaciers, the Northern Irish artists are championing Arctic culture – and documenting a collapsing world

It’s April 2023 and, in the wake of Bicep’s second album Isles cementing them as one of the leading electronic acts globally, Ferguson has travelled to Greenland as part of a project to collaborate with Indigenous musicians and bring the momentous struggle of this region – and even the planet – into focus. After Ferguson returned from Greenland, the first thing Bicep did was construct a drum kit from ice samples and other field recordings of local sounds including husky chains, then created demos, “really just chord structures we know we can write around” and sent them to the Indigenous artists. At times, progress seemed suitably glacial, but eventually a collection of Indigenous artists from Greenland and the wider Arctic region recorded their contributions at Iceland Airwaves festival in Reykjavík in November 2023, where many of them were in town performing, including Tarrak, Silla, vocalist Katarina Barruk and more.

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