Columbia Icefield: Ancient Songs of Burlap Heroes

Trumpeter Nate Wooley can create impressive large-scale compositions. His Seven Storey Mountain VI, (Pyroclastic, 2021) is a massive work, dealing with the rights of women, that used fourteen musicians and singers. His group, Columbia Icefield, achieves similar results with just four members, Wooley himself on trumpet and amplifier, Mary Halvorson on electric guitar, Susan Alcorn on pedal steel guitar and Ryan Sawyer on drums plus Mat Maneri and Trevor Dunn guesting on some tracks. This music moves at a glacial tempo, creating a vast sonic picture of man fighting futilely against the elements, an idea reinforced by the CD booklet's pictures of mostly deserted ice and snow covered buildings near the Arctic Circle.

The music plays as one continuous hour-long piece, but it is cut into seven tracks, three long sections separated by four shorter pieces of ambient linkage with only ellipses for titles. "I Am The Sea That Sings of Dust" is the first main section. It starts with a sound of distant blowing winds, which gives way to the ominous rumbling and blooming of Halvorson's and Alcorn's guitars and Mat Maneri's sawing viola. The background whoosh and rustle continues even as Wooley's squealing trumpet and Sawyer's cymbal play emerges. The latter part of the piece features strummed strings bleeding through the curtain of ambient noise. Throughout the music has a big, echoing sound as though it was being played in a large cavern.

A slow surge of ghostly Miles Davis-like trumpet leads into "A Catastrophic Legend" which features Wooley blowing mournfully into a gauzy sound field. A rubbery pedal steel interlude leads into a heavier rock tone set by Sawyer and electric bassist Dunn. Wooley plays with precision and increased volume but Halvorson dominates for a while, speeding and pinging over the rhythm section and turning the music into high-strung prog rock as it battles with the trumpet's concentrated force.

Wooley continues to peal over lurching heaviness in the interlude before crying out mounrfully on "Returning To Drown Myself, Finally," where his bursts of pure, sad melody alternate with a scratchy rustle that sounds like encroaching ocean waves. The guitars and drums return in a tumbling tangle that roils alongside Wooley's beautiful lines as they shape into a melancholy Ennio Morricone-like melody, music that goes on valiantly until it is finally overcome by the relentless crash of the waves as the album fades out.

There is the feel of huge depth to this work created by the way the individual instruments all seem to float in space surrounded by the natural sounds of wind and water. The music has a chilly grandeur as the players strive to create statements of humanity before the natural world drowns them out. This work is harsh and forbidding in spots but, in the end, it has a tension that makes it quite beautiful.

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