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ANTARCTICA SONGS by The Aquatic Ape Theory (2006)

(Web site download only) TAAT is the alter ego of San Diego-based Jim Behrens.  This collection of folksy roots rock was recorded at the Australian Antarctic base, Davis Station and mixed onboard the supply ship RSV Aurora Australis.  Tracks include White White (sample lyrics: “White white, everywhere you look is white, Sunlight comin’ up from below.  My face is turning red, it’s time for me to go to bed and dream of dreams of home.  I’ve been puttin’ in my time of workin’ on the line, and in this strange empty place filled with snow, day turns to night, someone forgot to turn off the lights.”), Sun Dogs, Amery, Vegemite and In a Tent (In a blizzard). We asked Jim in 2008 about the background of his music and he provided the following remarkable biography: “I am a geophysicist, and was fortunate enough to spend two summer seasons working in Antarctica as a post-doc at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.  I made a website during my second season (2006-07) where you can learn about the project and day-to-day life in the Antarctic: http://loose-tooth.ucsd.edu.  At the top of the ‘science’ page there is a link to a YouTube video I put together that gives a good summary as well.  On the ‘links’ page there is a link to photographs from the 2005-06 season, when the songs were written and recorded. I brought my guitar and harmonicas, along with a bare-bones recording rig, during that first season, 2005-06.  I spent two solid months living in tents on the Amery Ice Shelf as part of a 6-person field team, which is when I wrote the songs and lyrics.  We were collecting seismic data by laying out geophone arrays and setting off small charges of dynamite, to measure the thickness of the ice and the depth of the seawater beneath us.  One of the women in the team (Marianne Okal) was a classically-trained violinist, she brought a mandolin which she played wonderfully, and we wrote the music to Amery together, and she wrote her part for Sun Dogs.  The album cover photo is a timed self-portrait of us posing in front of the midnight sun out on the ice shelf.  We spent the final month of the season based back at Davis Station, where I stayed up late many nights to record the tracks in an empty room in the science building.  The hard walls and high ceiling created a nice natural reverb.  There is a band hut at Davis as well, and there were a surprising number of musicians down there that season.  I set up and recorded the drum tracks in the hut one afternoon, after most everything else had been recorded to a click track.  I played all the instruments except for some of the mandolin parts.  I mixed the songs during the two-week icebreaker transit back to Hobart, Tasmania, and sent them off to get mastered once I returned to California. The lyrics for White White, Sun Dogs, and Amery are my interpretations of and meditations on life on the ice shelf: being so far from home and spending the holidays with a small group of relative strangers; the overwhelming beauty, remoteness, and hostility of the environment; the interpersonal conflicts as well as the camaraderie; the mental and physical strain that accumulated over two months out there.  I came up with the bridge for White White while on a long snowmobile transit one fine morning.  The line ‘sun dogs, halos, iridescent rainbows’ refers to the unusual atmospheric optical effects that occur in the cold, clean air down there.  One night when I got out of my tent around 2 am and a low fog had settled on the ice shelf, there were sun dogs projected into the fog that looked to be about 10 meters away from my face.  Astonishing.  Vegemite is about me learning to love the stuff.  The expedition was run by the Australian Antarctic Division, and so there was an endless supply of Vegemite.  I wrote that one in about 10 minutes, and recorded the guitar and vocals on the first take.  In aTent (In a Blizzard) is actually two overlapping ambient sound recordings, made with the internal mic on my laptop, in two different tents on successive nights during a week-long blizzard.  I had intended to record some spare, simple guitar to go with it, but ran out of time.  I brought gear down again for the second season, but it was shorter, and when I was at Davis Station I had many more opportunities to get out on long multi-day hikes in the local area, which I couldn’t pass up.  I made time for music as well, but was mostly jamming with the other musicians at the base, and never really got any substantial recording done. Well that’s probably more that you wanted to know, but it’s not often that someone asks me about the music I make, which is my true passion in life.  I always travel with at least a guitar, and am always writing songs as I go.  I got about halfway through a proper album earlier this year, but had to put it on hold – I’ve been at sea in the Arctic now since May, but all the background noise on a ship makes it a bad place to record.  Anyway, I’ll be back home soon, and back to my studio with new songs in my head.”   www.jimbo.cc

 

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