Philip Samartzis and Michael Vorfeld Draw Music From an Antarctic Blizzard

Philip Samartzis has spent the past five years building one body of work out of Antarctica, and the titles chart it: Polar Force / Array with Eugene Ughetti in 2021, Atmospheres and Disturbances in 2023, Air Pressure with Michael Vorfeld in 2024. Atmospheric Pressure extends the sequence, with Vorfeld again on stringed instruments and percussion while Samartzis handles electronics.

The raw material comes from residencies sponsored by the Australian Antarctic Territory Arts Fellowship program, where Samartzis recorded in sub-zero conditions. This set centres on a 36-hour blizzard that hit Casey Research Station in 2016, hundred-knot winds and white-out conditions in which, by the project’s account, the station was reduced to pressure, vibration and sound.

What matters is what the two do with that archive. “Gravitational Overflow” opens with a slow increase in wind while Vorfeld’s strings suggest the creak of vanes; the storm supplies its own harmonic bed. “Depression” turns on the failure of electricity rather than its hum, with radio chatter and a percussive passage that arrives early and then takes over. “Cold Front” is the most agitated of the three, strings and cymbals bending around each other until recorded storm and impression of storm are difficult to separate.

Field recordings from extreme environments often collapse into documentation. Here the work is in the playing and the shaping, which treat the blizzard as material rather than subject.