Sound from the Ice
Field recording on the Gries Glacier for a National Geographic art project
In 2025, I joined artist Tomas Van Houtryve on an expedition to the Gries Glacier in the Swiss Alps. The project, developed in collaboration with National Geographic, explored the human impact on alpine landscapes through immersive visual and audio documentation.
My role was to capture the hidden sound world of the glacier — not only the obvious environmental sounds, but also the subtle, almost invisible movements beneath the surface: shifting ice, trickling meltwater, falling rocks, distant cracks, and a deep low-frequency presence that seemed to come from within the glacier itself.
Mobile recording setup on the Gries Glacier, built around the Merging Anubis SPS Premium.
Recording the hidden sound world of the glacier — ice movement, meltwater, rocks and low-frequency resonances.
For this recording trip, I used a fully mobile setup built around the Merging Anubis SPS Premium, housed in a custom portable Peli case with redundant battery power. The goal was to bring a studio-grade recording chain into an extreme outdoor environment while staying light, flexible, and completely mobile.
After a long hike across the alpine landscape, we began recording directly on the glacier. At first, I thought something was wrong with the equipment: through the headphones, I heard a constant low humming sound. But it quickly became clear that this was not a technical issue — it was the glacier itself.
That moment was the core of the experience. The microphone and monitoring chain revealed details that were almost impossible to perceive with the naked ear. The Anubis captured the glacier with remarkable transparency and dynamic range, allowing these quiet, fragile and powerful sounds to become part of the project’s sonic language.
For me, this story represents what I love about sound design: using technology not only as a technical tool, but as a way to discover, listen and reveal hidden layers of the world around us.