‘I travelled from Edinburgh to Antarctica to make music’

It is the least populated continent on Earth, but for Scottish composer Michael Begg spending several weeks in Antarctica was anything but silent.

“Antarctica is often called the quietest continent but it is actually raging with sound,” says the Edinburgh native, now back on home soil.

“The wind never lets up and there is so much wildlife. If you’re on the ocean then you’re never far from whales, you always hear them calling and spouting around. Then when you’re on shore you have seals and penguins screaming everywhere.”

Now Michael’s trip – where he spent nearly three months aboard the Royal Navy’s ice patrol vessel, HMS Protector – has provided material for both an album and film.

While on his trip he captured everything from glaciers crumbling to a penguin colony that resembled “a holiday camp”, resulting in a continual spectacle that left the 58-year-old awestruck.

Those sounds have now been blended into Michael’s own musical ideas, resulting in Out of Whose Womb Comes The Ice – a collection of eerie, haunting music he will premiere at the end of September.

“The sense of awe became almost tiring as it never let up,” he reflects.

“There wasn’t a lot of darkness, so it was almost 24 hours straight for the most extraordinary sights and sounds and colours. Obviously, I expected the cold, I expected ice and I expected white but what I didn’t expect was the entire colour palette of the planet changes.

“You have bizarre lemon sherbet yellow sunsets and curious purple colours of water. There is so little that’s familiar to hold onto, so you just have to let go.”

Musical experiments are nothing new to Michael, and neither is utilizing nature and science in his work.

A prolific sound artist since 2000, previous experiences have included composer residencies with the Ocean ARTic Partnership and the European Marine Board.

That work saw him collaborate with scientists to create music from polar research – a style he describes as “finding music to come to us from the world”, where he uses computer programming and studio manipulation to soundtrack data.

That work led him to becoming musician in residence with the Friends of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, and when they suggested taking a trip with the Royal Navy he jumped at the chance.

While onboard the composer was “treated very well”, even his hosts may have raised eyebrows at some requests.

“I was going to a place on the planet that is very harsh and you can’t survive in for any length of time,” he says.

“So when I asked if the Marines could take me down in a small dinghy, take me across to an inhospitable island and leave me there for the day, they were like, ‘if that’s what you want we’ll need to prepare you as much as we can’.

“I was going into these extraordinary locations and left to my own devices.”

The results proved inspiring in more ways than expected. Initially taking a video camera to capture still images rather than using his phone, Michael had enough footage to create an accompany film of his experiences.

It is a body of work that he hopes will convey a changing climate, where water is increasingly warm and glacier ice was carving away.

“There is a fragility there. All I had to do was point the microphone at it, and you have this great, sorrowful expanse of ice beginning to crack and fade.

Michael admits that he has no desire “to be the sort of climate artist who is hitting people with a very hard message”, and instead hopes his work will let people “find their own way into it”.

Yet some of his experiences spokes for themselves.

“I was on Deception Island (in the South Shetland Islands, near the Antarctic Peninsula), which was actually the cauldron of a volcano.

“There had been a research station there and a whaling station there, but a succession of volcanic eruptions had driven people away. At this time of year it should be pretty solid, but there was just a sound of running water everywhere – it was like a Scottish spring after snow.

“It felt wrong, because it shouldn’t sound like that there.”

That uneasiness carries over into his work, which he will premiere at the Glad Cafe in Glasgow on 27 September as part of Sonica, the festival that combines new music and dynamic audiovisual art.

But if parts of his trip could be unsettling, then there was considerable wonder and beauty too, particularly from blending in with the natives on Bertha’s Beach in the Falkland Islands.

“I was a penguin for the afternoon,” he recalls.

“I took a long walk out there and found a colony of Gentoo penguins. It was a curious affair, because most of them barely acknowledged me.

“A few came up to me and were like ‘what ye uptae?’ It was being in a penguin holiday camp – there were lovers having an argument, kids swimming, others sunbathing and some were gathered at a wee dune, having what looked like a meeting.

“There were guidelines about not getting close, but no-one had told the penguins that…”