Glacier is a lost score for an experimental film about the disappearance of glaciers around the world. The film project failed to materialize, but the cassette recordings of the improvised sessions by Rodrigo Amarante and Elliot Bergman stuck around. After some processing and layering, they found their way to Matthew Lacasse of Fellowship Records, who was inspired to release the material on cassette tape, the same way these sessions were recorded. The recordings took place at Bergman’s Studio Figueroa in Los Angeles, which is filled with a collection of his own handmade instruments: Metal Tongue Bells, Peace Bells, lamellophones, and gong-like sculptures made of steel and bronze.

Across these tracks Bergman and Amarante craft a sonic landscape that mirrors glacial motion: patient, massive, and quietly inexorable. Sparse arrangements give each note room to resonate, while delicate harmonies and elongated phrases evoke the measured progress of ice across a fjord. Textures shift with subtlety — creaking low-register drones, crystalline plucked timbres, suggesting both the immense weight and the fragile surface of a glacier.

The album favors atmosphere over immediacy. Rhythms, when present, are slow and deliberate; motifs unfold gradually, inviting close listening to catch small transformations. Melodic fragments repeat and refract, much as sunlight fractures across ice, creating moments of quiet luminosity amid a prevailing hush. Production emphasizes space and reverberation, allowing instruments to bloom and decay as if in a vast, reflective hollow. Sonically Glacier leans toward introspection rather than narrative. Amarante’s poetic sensibility and Bergman’s compositional restraint merge to produce songs that feel like reflections on time, endurance, and the subtle forces that shape landscapes and memory. The result is an album that rewards patience: over repeated plays it reveals deeper contours, like mapping a hidden crevasse or noticing the slow calving of a distant shelf.

For listeners drawn to meditative, textural music, Glacier offers a contemplative journey—an elegy to slowness rendered with meticulous detail and quiet beauty.

Using a set of woodblocks, rollers, and stamps, Bergman and Amarante collaborated on a series of handmade ink drawings of which 200 unique cassette are hand-numbered and signed. Available here or locally at FUR (Figueroa Unanimous Radio) located in Highland Park, Los Angeles CA.