Iglooghost: Visiting weird or unfamiliar environments is a great creative prompt

The Bristol-based electronic producer heads north for a sampling session at Warrington’s Risley Moss peat bog.

CC Co. has teamed up with On the Edge for ReRooted – a three-part video series and invitation to tune into nature. We’re following three musicians as they spend the day in one of Britain’s natural landscapes and capture sounds to use in a new track.

Iglooghost needs to get out more. Those aren’t our words – it’s the conclusion he drew himself after spending a day knee-deep in a peat bog. The producer ventured out of his Bristol studio and up to Warrington – waders in tow – to see what a deep dive beneath the surface of ancient peat bog, Risley Moss, might conjure up. Iglooghost often looks to the natural world as inspiration for making music. The mind-altering sound design on his latest album Tidal Memory Exo brings into relief the rock pools and oceanic scum of an imagined abstract British seaside town. Each album is highly-narrativised, centred around the lore and logic of a mystical world where the future and the past co-exist. 

A peat bog, then, feels like his music’s natural habitat. Steeped in mythology, peat bogs have long aroused intrigue in superstitious minds. Layers of peat form over thousands of years, made up of organic material that isn’t able to rot in the bog’s acidic, anaerobic conditions. Dead trees stand for decades, corpses are preserved. It’s a perfect example of when the natural world appears to move in supernatural ways.  

Iglooghost had no problem letting his imagination run wild. He approached Risley Moss with the curiosity of a child, instead of the fact-finding instinct of a scientist – his MO since growing up in awe of the New Age traditions commonplace in his rural Dorset hometown. He used a handheld microphone to capture the bog’s squelch, ripple and gurgle, collaborating with Large Heath Butterfly and Sundew to create the track Anaer0bic. Here, he reflects on the process.

Your work’s strange cyber-realism might seem at odds with some peoples’ preconceived ideas of art depicting the natural world. How does it make sense to you?

I grew up in the north Dorset countryside, and something that really stuck with me as a kid was someone describing its endless fields as a ‘green desert.’ My friends and I used to talk (in a sort of teenage-angst ridden way) about how the never-ending planes of dull green used to be rich woodlands full of trees and wolves and ecosystems. I think it’s easy to forget that a lot of the UK’s countryside is unnatural and terraformed, like a giant version of those fake lawns that people spray with pesticide. I’ve always been inspired by barren or corrupted ecosystems, by imagining a pure and folkloric force trying to survive somewhere inside it. Films I saw as a kid,  like Princess Mononoke, were also really influential on this way of thinking, as well as growing up around a lot of new age travellers. Environmental themes are always present in the music/imagery I make – not in a very idyllic way, more as a conflict or point of tension.

What were your first impressions of Risley Moss? How did it speak to your creative sensibilities?

I really liked this feeling of how much energy and CO2 was compacted inside it, kind of like a dormant volcano. It felt like it was nobly carrying the burden of stopping all this carbon from being released, and if humans tried to, I don’t know, turn it into a big Tesco say, it would explode and release it all – kind of like a big balloon that someone foolish would want to pop.

What were you trying to convey in the track? Which themes, vibes or narratives?

The dense, claustrophobic feeling of mud suction and energy storage. I loved the sounds of the birds and dragonflies that were patrolling the bog, beeping and chirping like little machines. I cross-referenced with the sounds I recorded to make something that gave me that same feeling. It was really fun trying to make drums that sounded like they were bobbing up and down in high-viscosity mud.

You often synthesise natural environments in your music, but it’s in a more abstract way than the field recording techniques you practised for ReRooted. How did you feel going into this project and what in particular were you looking forward to?

I take recordings and use them as a moodboard or index of references to reinterpret. I usually dig for the references from abandoned websites, old books/magazines or forgotten children’s toys adverts. All without leaving my laptop at all, so going to Risley Moss was a really different process. I can also spend up to a year writing music that fits into the very specific world I’m creating in an album, so making this one-off track was nice because it was like a temporary standalone bog world I could play around in.

Can you explain more about the visual component of your music-making process?

Using images feels intuitive and childlike to me and avoids approaching making music in a way that feels too clinical or objective. Album artworks, for example, have a really profound effect on how people perceive the music. I always wanna do it as much justice as I can.

How does tuning into nature change the way you perceive your surroundings?

Walking around or looking out of the car window and projecting imaginary images onto nature or my surroundings has been my favourite thing to do since I was a kid, you know, using my surroundings like an empty canvas or a base layer. The world-building aspect of my albums usually resemble an augmented version of where I’d been living while making it. My last album Tidal Memory Exo takes place in a polluted intertidal zone, inspired by a beach near my old house with really ancient-looking rockpools, a waste treatment plant pumping sewage out of these big rusty pipes, and apocalyptic sunsets that bathed everything in a strange orange colour.

What was the biggest learning of your time both on-shoot and in the studio? Is there anything you’ll take forward into future projects?

The process was just really fun, and immediately gratifying. It’s easy to get lost in ‘eras’ or whatever. Visiting weird or unfamiliar environments is a great creative prompt. It made me realise I need to get out of my mouldy studio more, and go outside.

Feel ready to Tune into Nature? Episode two of ReRooted with Iglooghost is out now. Watch the mini documentary above and access a free download of the loops and samples Iglooghost used on ‘Anaer0bic’ here.

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