logo
‘Seeing climate change like this, it changes you': dance duo Bicep on making an album in Greenland

‘Seeing climate change like this, it changes you': dance duo Bicep on making an album in Greenland

The Guardian01-07-2025
Russell glacier, at the edge of Greenland's vast ice sheet, sounds as if it's crying: moans emanate from deep within the slowly but inexorably melting ice. Andy Ferguson, one half of dance duo Bicep, walks around in its towering shadow recording these eerie sounds. 'Everyone comes back changed,' he says of Greenland. 'Seeing first-hand climate change happening like this.'
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.
The project will take two years to come to fruition but next month sees the release of Bicep's first soundtrack and accompanying film Takkuuk, pronounced tuck-kook. It's an Inuktitut word that came from throat singing duo Silla, one of the Indigenous collaborators: 'It translates to literally 'look' but has the connotation that you're urging someone to look at something closely,' says Silla's Charlotte Qamaniq. 'The Arctic climate is changing rapidly so in the context of the project it's: 'look, the adverse effects of climate change are obvious.' But it's also: 'hey, look how cool Inuit culture is!''
I join Ferguson on this first trip along with representatives from EarthSonic, a non-profit organisation dedicated to raising awareness about the climate crisis through art projects. Ferguson's Bicep partner Matt McBriar stays home ahead of the birth of his first child.
When we land at Kangerlussuaq airport, first opened as a US airbase in the second world war, it's -10C, bright and crisp. Ferguson is staying with our driver Evald who, on learning that Ferguson and I are Man United fans, exclaims: 'Manchester United is my religion! Old Trafford is my church!' His home has a huge Lego model of the stadium. Across the next week we see the northern lights – in Inuit myth, it's dead souls playing ball with a walrus's head – and ride dogsleds and snowmobiles, but there's a sobering tone to the beauty and adventure.
Russell glacier is a 20km journey by four-wheel drive on a rough dirt road. The ice sheet covers 80% of the country, but loss of ice from Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has quadrupled since the 90s due to climate change, and is the principal driver of rising sea levels. Scientists predict if the world continues on a course towards 2.5C heating it will take us beyond a tipping point for both ice sheets, resulting in a catastrophic sea level rise of 12 metres. Standing under a vast glacier that is hundreds of thousands of years old, but which could disappear within my daughters' lifetime, is discombobulating.
Next morning it's on to Sisimiut for Arctic Sounds, a showcase for music from across the Arctic region and beyond. Sisimiut is Greenland's second city, home to 5,000, and a thriving metropolis compared with Kangerlussuaq. Rock and metal are the most popular music, alongside rap and other Indigenous music and the standout acts include an incendiary performance by Greenlandic rapper Tarrak. 'Seeing Tarrak perform was so powerful,' Ferguson says, with 'everyone chanting in this language I'd never heard before. It felt punk. It's rare to see that nowadays when everything is so homogenised.'
The project is allowing Bicep to flex different musical muscles. Playing a simultaneously melancholic and euphoric style of tech-house and electronica, Bicep broke through in the mid-2010s. Their track Glue became a ubiquitous rave anthem among gen Z, and led to the success of Isles, which reached No 2 in the UK charts and earned them two Brit award nominations. Everything was rosy, but it was, in Ferguson's words, 'all sugar, no sour', so they created alter egos Chroma and Dove to show their harder, headier side. The Arctic was an opportunity to challenge themselves again.
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. They didn't expect to get almost full songs in return, but on hearing what came back, the duo realised 'we needed to step back and not be the focal point'. A gig on a glacier had been one initial mooted idea, but the Greenland trip made it obvious such a gig would be 'tone deaf', says Ferguson. Through conversations with Indigenous artists, 'it became clear this needed to be us shining a light on them'.
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.
When I catch up with Ferguson and meet his Bicep-mate McBriar in late 2024, they're buzzing about the results, and by late May, I'm finally able to hear the full thing in their Shoreditch studio. From the first bars of opener Sikorsuit, featuring Greenlandic indie band Nuija, it's clear the duo have managed to pull myriad styles and dialect into a cohesive whole. 'It doesn't sound anything like us – and it doesn't sound like them,' McBriar says. 'That's what you hope to achieve from a collaboration.'
Tarrak collaboration Taarsitillugu opens with a sparse breakbeat and becomes a full-on rave banger, while on her track Dárbbuo, Barruk sings in Ume Sámi, an endangered Uralic language spoken by fewer than 20 people. 'I went in to the studio and just poured my heart out because of the tragic state the world is in,' she says, 'then Matt and Andy worked their magic.'
There was synchronicity, despite different languages. 'It shows a strong connection between us Indigenous sister and brothers,' explains Barruk, who is Swedish. 'Without me knowing takkuuk means look, I created lyrics which ask the other person to vuöjnniet, to see, so one doesn't need to feel so alone. Alone in the fight for our lands, our ways of living, our language, culture and taking care of the Earth.'
As the project developed it was clear it needed context, so Bicep asked Zak Norman, who designs their brilliant on-stage visuals, to create an immersive installation. Norman worked with Charlie Miller, a documentary film-maker who went on the original Greenland trip, on a film that introduces the artists and explores the displacement and marginalisation of their communities, cultures and language. Norman used adapted infrared cameras to give the footage otherworldly pink and purple hues, reminiscent of Richard Mosse's 2013 video artwork The Enclave. The film is a series of vignettes for each track, and it certainly deepens the music, with eerie landscapes layered with interviews. The work will premiere on the giant wraparound screens at London's Outernet next month, before touring venues and festivals across the world.
The project has taken on yet another hue in the wake of Donald Trump's recent expansionist proclamations. 'It's a circus,' says Tarrak. 'The first time Trump asked to buy Greenland [during his first. term as president] we took it as a joke. Now I can see there's some seriousness – but it's still just weird, in 2025, to try and buy a country. I know they're more interested in what's under the ground than the people, but we have to be smart about it as Greenlanders, stick together and be aware of people trying to divide us.'
Bicep experienced their own existential crisis when McBriar had to have surgery for a large tumour on his brain's pituitary gland last year, from which he's thankfully made a good recovery. They're now deep into their third album proper, though it won't see daylight from their basement studio for at least another year. 'We wrote [Isles] pre-pandemic so it's a complete different world now. With Chroma we wanted to get that aggression out and cleanse ourselves of what we wanted to do, just straight club tracks. Now I think we're coming full circle.'
How will you judge the success of Takkuuk, I ask. 'You can't quantify awareness,' says Ferguson. 'If it starts people on a journey to learn more about Greenland then it's achieved something.
'It's easy to switch off with climate change, I switch off myself sometimes,' he continues. 'But if you start telling the story in different ways, different narratives, ways people can visualise it, at least it's a start. Because for the next generation it's going to be the focal part of their life.'
Takkuuk premieres at Outernet, London, 3 July, then tours. The soundtrack Takkuuk is released by Ninja Tune on 25 July
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Now scientists blame REDUCTIONS in air pollution in China for the acceleration in global warming
Now scientists blame REDUCTIONS in air pollution in China for the acceleration in global warming

Daily Mail​

time3 hours ago

  • Daily Mail​

Now scientists blame REDUCTIONS in air pollution in China for the acceleration in global warming

Reductions in air pollution might sound like a positive thing. But scientists now say that reductions in East Asia are actually to blame for the sudden, rapid acceleration in global warming. While air pollution kills millions, it also whitens clouds. In turn, this makes the clouds reflect more sunlight back into space - helping to keep our planet cool. As China and other nations slash their emissions, they are inadvertently removing the artificial shade that has been holding back the full force of climate change, experts from the University of Reading say. Co-author Professor Laura Wilcox, from the University of Reading, told MailOnline: 'This shading effect from air pollution has offset some of the warming we should have seen due to increasing greenhouse gases. 'As we improve air quality, we remove some of this shading effect, unmasking more warming from greenhouse gases. 'Reducing our aerosol emissions isn't causing warming directly, but revealing more of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.' Since 1970, the world has been warming by around 0.18°C (0.32°F) per decade, but this suddenly increased to around 0.24°C (0.43°F) starting from around 2010. For some researchers, this led to the worrying conclusion that the planet's climate sensitivity - how much warming is produced by a given amount of CO2 - might be at the higher end of estimates. However, Dr Wilcox and her co-authors have proposed an alternative theory. They noticed that the sudden increase in warming coincided very closely with East Asia's rapid air pollution cleanup. In the last few decades, countries in East Asia have undergone dramatic transformations to clean up their air. China, where air pollution is responsible for one million premature deaths per year, was responsible for three-quarters of all global air pollution reductions in the last decade. This has led to a 75 per cent reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions over the past 15 years. When pollutants like sulphur dioxide are released into the atmosphere, they form a fine mist of tiny particles called sulfate aerosols, which drift up into the atmosphere. These particles reflect sunlight themselves and influence the way clouds form to make them whiter and more long-lasting. This acts as a 'cooling sunshade' which prevents some solar radiation from reaching Earth and being trapped by the greenhouse effect. While the cleanup is absolutely necessary to save millions of lives, it also has the unintentional consequence of producing a temporary spike in warming. Previous studies predicted that our planet would become 0.23°C (0.37°F) warmer, but the planet actually warmed by 0.33°C (0.55°F). Using 160 computer simulations, the researchers showed that the East Asian cleanup produced almost all of the extra warming over the last 15 years. These simulations showed that East Asia's rapid cleanup is responsible for 0.07°C (0.12°F) of this increase. Overall, there has been so much pollution in the air that it has kept human-caused warming in check by up to 0.5°C (0.84°F) over the last century. While this is a very small amount compared to total human-caused warming, around 1.3°C (2.2°F) since 1850, it shows that Earth's climate sensitivity is lower than some feared. From this, it might be tempting to conclude that climate change is not really as bad as some scientists had thought. Now that air pollution has been largely reduced, CO2 will once again take over as the main driver of global warming and will not stop warming the planet on its current trend (illustrated) until CO2 levels are reduced However, the researchers say their study proves the complete opposite. Lead-author Dr Bjørn Samset, from the CICERO Centre for International Climate Research, told MailOnline: 'In one sense it means that global warming is worse than before.' Air pollution has been hiding the warming that CO2 levels should have produced, and the planet is only now catching up to where it should be. The worst of the catch-up period may now be over, but the planet will continue to warm as greenhouse gas emissions take over as the main driver of change. 'The majority of the warming is still, and will continue to be, from greenhouse gas emissions, and the planet will keep warming until we manage to reach net zero CO2 emissions,' says Dr Samset. 'We were always going to need to face up to the full effects of global warming. 'In fact, in order to keep to the targets of the Paris agreement, we now have to work even harder to rapidly cut our greenhouse gas emissions, since the acceleration has put us closer to 1.5 degrees of global warming even quicker than feared.' The invisible dangers of poor air quality Poor air quality is the largest environmental risk factor for early deaths leading to an estimated 8 million deaths per year globally, according to recent analysis by the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. The World Health Organisation recently stated that almost every organ in the body can be impacted by air pollution and that due to their small size, some pollutants penetrate the bloodstream via the lungs and circulate throughout the entire body, leading to systemic inflammation and carcinogenicity. Exposure to air pollution can lead to strokes, ischaemic heart disease, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, pneumonia, diabetes, cognitive impairment, dementia and neurological diseases. There is also some evidence linking air pollution exposure to the increased risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes, such as low birth weight.

Trump administration says it won't publish major climate change report on NASA website as promised
Trump administration says it won't publish major climate change report on NASA website as promised

The Independent

time16 hours ago

  • The Independent

Trump administration says it won't publish major climate change report on NASA website as promised

The Trump administration on Monday took another step to make it harder to find major, legally mandated scientific assessments of how climate change is endangering the nation and its people. Earlier this month, the official government websites that hosted the authoritative, peer-reviewed national climate assessments went dark. Such sites tell state and local governments and the public what to expect in their backyards from a warming world and how best to adapt to it. At the time, the White House said NASA would house the reports to comply with a 1990 law that requires the reports, which the space agency said it planned to do. But on Monday, NASA announced that it aborted those plans. 'The USGCRP (the government agency that oversees and used to host the report) met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress. NASA has no legal obligations to host data," NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens said in an email. That means no data from the assessment or the government science office that coordinated the work will be on NASA, she said. On July 3, NASA put out a statement that said: "All preexisting reports will be hosted on the NASA website, ensuring continuity of reporting.' 'This document was written for the American people, paid for by the taxpayers, and it contains vital information we need to keep ourselves safe in a changing climate, as the disasters that continue to mount demonstrate so tragically and clearly,' said Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. She is chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and co-author of several past national climate assessments. Copies of past reports are still squirreled away in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 's library and the latest report and its interactive atlas can be seen here. Former Obama White House science adviser and climate scientist John Holdren accused the administration of outright lying and long intended to censor or bury the reports. 'The new stance is classic Trump administration misdirection,' Holdren said. 'In this instance, the administration offers a modest consolation to quell initial outrage over the closure of the site and the disappearance of the National Climate Assessments. Then, two weeks later, they snatch away the consolation with no apology.' 'They simply don't want the public to see the meticulously assembled and scientifically validated information about what climate change is already doing to our farms, forests, and fisheries, as well as to storms, floods, wildfires, and coast property — and about how all those damages will grow in the absence of concerted remedial action,' Holdren said in an email. That's why it's important that state and local governments and every day people see these reports, Holdren said. He said they are written in a way that is 'useful to people who need to understand what climate change is doing and will do to THEM, their loved ones, their property and their environment." 'Trump doesn't want people to know,' Holdren wrote. The most recent report, issued in 2023, found that climate change is affecting people's security, health and livelihoods in every corner of the country in different ways, with minority communities, particularly Native Americans, often disproportionately at risk. ___ The Associated Press' climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at

Why cleaner air is actually accelerating global warming
Why cleaner air is actually accelerating global warming

The Independent

time21 hours ago

  • The Independent

Why cleaner air is actually accelerating global warming

Global warming has picked up pace since around 2010, leading to the recent string of record warm years. Why this is happening is still unclear, and among the biggest questions in climate science today. Our new study reveals that reductions in air pollution – particularly in China and east Asia – are a key reason for this faster warming. Cleanup of sulphur emissions from global shipping has been implicated in past research. But that cleanup only began in 2020, so it's considered too weak to explain the full extent of this acceleration. Nasa researchers have suggested that changes in clouds could play a role, either through reductions in cloud cover in the tropics or over the North Pacific. One factor that has not been well quantified, however, is the effect of monumental efforts by countries in east Asia, notably China, to combat air pollution and improve public health through strict air quality policies. There has already been a 75% reduction in east Asian sulphur dioxide emissions since around 2013, and that cleanup effort picked up pace just as global warming began accelerating. Our study addresses the link between east Asian air quality improvements and global temperature, building on the efforts of eight teams of climate modellers across the world. We have found that polluted air may have been masking the full effects of global warming. Cleaner air could now be revealing more of the human-induced global warming from greenhouse gases. In addition to causing millions of premature deaths, air pollution shields the Earth from sunlight and therefore cools the surface. There has been so much air pollution that it has held human-induced warming in check by up to 0.5°C over the last century. With the cleanup of air pollution, something that's vital for human health, this artificial sunshade is removed. Since greenhouse gas emissions have kept on increasing, the result is that the Earth's surface is warming faster than ever before. Modelling the cleanup Our team used 160 computer simulations from eight global climate models. This enabled us to better quantify the effects that east Asian air pollution has on global temperature and rainfall patterns. We simulated a cleanup of pollution similar to what has happened in the real world since 2010. We found an extra global warming of around 0.07°C. While this is a small number compared with the full global warming of around 1.3°C since 1850, it is still enough to explain the recent acceleration in global warming when we take away year-to-year swings in temperature from natural cycles such as El Niño, a climate phenomenon in the Pacific that affects weather patterns globally. Based on long-term trends, we would have expected around 0.23°C of warming since 2010. However, we actually measured around 0.33°C. While the additional 0.1°C can largely be explained by the east Asian air pollution cleanup, other factors include the change in shipping emissions and the recent accelerated increase in methane concentrations in the atmosphere. Air pollution causes cooling by reflecting sunlight or by changing the properties of clouds so they reflect more sunlight. The cleanup in east Asian air pollution influences global temperatures because it reduces the shading effect of the pollution over east Asia itself. It also means less pollution is blown across the north Pacific, causing clouds in the east Pacific to reflect less sunlight. The pattern of these changes across the North Pacific simulated in our models matches that seen in satellite observations. Our models and temperature observations also show relatively strong warming over the North Pacific, downwind from east Asia. The main source of global warming is still greenhouse gas emissions, and a cleanup of air pollution was both necessary and overdue. This did not cause the additional warming but rather, removed an artificial cooling that has for a time helped shield us from some of the extreme weather and other well-established consequences of climate change. Global warming will continue for decades. Indeed, our past and future emissions of greenhouse gases will affect the climate for centuries. However, air pollution is quickly removed from the atmosphere, and the recent acceleration in global warming from this particular unmasking may therefore be short-lived. Laura Wilcox is a Professor at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store