JACOB KIRKEGAARD

SNOWBLIND

Snowblind is a dark and hostile yet poetic album inspired by three Swedish explorers' failed attempt to reach the North Pole by balloon in the late 19th Century. Perhaps driven by blind adventurism, perhaps consumed by his own delusions, S.A. Andrée launched this ill-fated flight in July 1897, registering only two days in the air before crashing into the ice and ultimately failing to navigate the frigid waters and ice floes. Yet documentation of their expedition - photographic, scientific, and diaristic - survived, to be discovered some thirty years after their deaths.

Vinyl release by Helen Scarsdale Agency, USA, 2025 Snowblind, 10 tracks, 37 minutes @ 2025

“I wanted to created a cold and hostile album, where there is no escape, no warmth and no happy ending,” as Kirkegaard explains about Snowblind. “Yet, I wanted to leave out any immediate drama. It is the creeping shock, the icy feeling from realizing what has been lost and that there’s no escape.”

Yes, Snowblind is a very bleak album, but one that eschews the isolationist, long-form drone of conceptually similar works by Thomas Köner, Lustmord, Werkbund, and Lull with interconnected constellations of cryptic tone, thrumming reverberation, arctic bluster, and a plethora of harrowing sonic proclamations.

Reviews

Jacob Kirkegaard - Snowblind
The Helen Scarsdale Agency DL/LP
Review in The Wire by Spenser Tomson, March 2025:
In July 1897, Salomon August Andrée embarked on a mission to reach the North Pole by balloon. While the Swede had some experience as an explorer - from 1882-83 he’d participated in an expedition through Norway’s Arctic Svalbard archipelago - his profession at the time of this polar journey was that of patent officer. With no experience of balloon flight whatsoever, their voyage ended in disaster: after 65 hours, the hydrogen balloon crashed on to the ice, forcing its passengers (alongside Andrée were engineer Knut Frænkel and photographer Nils Strindberg) to continue traversing the pack ice on foot. Less than two weeks later, all three had perished, though the full details of their exploits were only revealed when their bodies were finally recorded in 1930, more than three decades later.

This type of frozen, doomy tale is perfect ferritory for Jacob Kirkegaard, the Danish sound artist whose previous works have included an installation around the sound of creaking glaciers (2013’s Isfald) and, alongside Tobias Kirstein, an album recorded in the concrete heart of a nuclear power station (2012’s Imperia). That said, Snowblind is his coldest, hardest and darkest work to date. “Ascend” and “Perish” bookend the narrative, the former a rising blast of harsh Arctic climatics, the latter depicting a demise in a way that’s matter of fact rather than heroic, low key electronic ambience gradually seeping back in to the earth.

While there are shifts in texture and tone - such as “Scavenge”, whose morphing edges register like fleeting but impish hallucinations caused by the white glare of the snow - these pieces are unremitting and brutal, the subject matter lending them extra emotional weight. Unlike other Kirkegaard works such as 2006’s 4 Rooms - which plucks spectral beauty from several abandoned spaces around Chernobyl - there are few moments of optimism here. Snowblind is as sonically unrelenting as the conditions that dogged Andrée’s doomed expedition.

Jacob Kirkegaard - Snowblind
The Helen Scarsdale Agency DL/LP
Review for Chain D.L.K by Vito Camarretta, February 2025:
Jacob Kirkegaard’s "Snowblind" is an album of frozen inevitability. A slow, numbing descent into an abyss of ice, wind, and regret. The Danish composer, known for his masterful work with sonic decay and environmental resonance, here conjures the spectral echoes of a doomed expedition - the 1897 attempt by Swedish explorer S.A. Andrée to reach the North Pole by balloon. A story of blind ambition, crushed under the weight of indifferent ice.

Kirkegaard, who has previously turned his ear to the radioactive hum of Chernobyl ("4 Rooms") and the ominous creaks of melting Arctic landscapes, is no stranger to hostile environments. But "Snowblind" is not merely an exploration of extreme cold - it is an auditory experience of loss, isolation, and the slow erosion of hope. The album is devoid of warmth, devoid of reprieve, its beauty lying in the solemn, glacial inevitability of its sound.

Across eleven starkly titled tracks - "Ascend", "Drift", "Astray", "Barren", "Nyctophobia", "Wreckage", "Scavenge", "Animal", "Phantasmagoria", "Torment", "Perish" - Kirkegaard builds an atmosphere of creeping dread. There is no melodrama, no grand orchestral swells, just a relentless, monochromatic freeze. The textures shift subtly: thrumming reverberations suggest distant ice cracking under its own weight, hollow tones evoke breath caught in frigid air, while occasional gusts of white noise feel like the very wind that sealed Andrée’s fate.

Unlike the cavernous drones of Thomas Köner or the subterranean gloom of Lustmord, Kirkegaard avoids total stasis. There are movements, however glacial - "Drift" flutters uneasily, "Astray" stumbles through snowblind disorientation, "Nyctophobia" swarms like a chorus of frozen ghosts. By the time "Perish" arrives, there is no catharsis, only the slow extinguishing of a light already too faint to see.

What makes "Snowblind" so affecting is Kirkegaard’s ability to distill not just the sound of ice, but its psychology. This is an album about the slow realization of failure, about realizing you will not be found, that history will move on without you. It is not a work of escapism, but of confrontation - a sonification of frostbite, of human hubris vanishing into the white void.

Like the recovered notebooks and photographs of Andrée’s doomed journey, "Snowblind" is an artifact of something lost. It does not romanticize the adventure; it documents the stillness after the struggle, the way snow buries all trace of movement. In Kirkegaard’s hands, sound itself becomes frostbitten, brittle, and ultimately, silent.

Listen to the album or buy it via The Helen Scardale Agency:

Exploring the 1st notes for Snowblind. Photos and video by Janus Helmin Torgrim Welling, 2020

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