PORTRAITS OF CLIMATE DRAMA

This fall, the Czech-Icelandic collaboration fyield will bring their unique live experience to the US for the very first time. On their debut album, Future Landscapes, fyield explores the locations used to satiate the needs of our society in terms of power consumption and nourishment, or places impacted by the exigencies of industrial society. Altogether, the artists’ adventurous journey shows us how solutions to existing problems bring new, often unsuspected and complicated issues. By focusing on the sound that emanates from technological, power-generating and other entities, they testify to our existence beyond the visible. Their work portrays unique entities that don’t usually attract our attention – even though our civilization depends on them. They are not people, mythical figures or animals, but technological devices and ecosystems that open up questions about our climate future.

The album was preceded by a sonic expedition. A group of musicians, accompanied by leading European field recordists, Sara Pinheiro from Portugal and Magnús Bergsson from Iceland, visited eight locations in the Czech Republic and Iceland. With the help of special instruments such as hydrophones, geophones, ambeo and electromagnetic sensors, they listened to the manifestations of infrastructures that the human ear alone cannot hear. The compositions bring us close to, or inside, the organs of geothermal, hydroelectric or coal-fired power plants, a CO2 repository, an aquaponic farm, a lagoon created by melting glaciers, and an oil well. The Czech Republic and Iceland represent countries with contrasting approaches to CO2 production. The Czech fossil-fuel-impacted landscape is juxtaposed with the seemingly environmentally sensitive Iceland, where the technology it employs poses a number of problems of a completely different type.

fyield warns us that it is futile to hope for a single save-all solution to the climate crisis.

This unique live experience will also include a screening of Invisible Landscapes, a film by Ivo Bystřičan (awarded as the best film documentary at the AFO: The 58th International Festival of Science Documentary Films, Academia Film Olomouc of Palacký University 2023). It sounds like a bird’s song, and you can’t take your ears off it. But it’s not – it’s just the popping bubbles of a melting glacier. A group of musicians equipped with sensitive microphones and headphones set out on an exploration. They head to places in the Czech and Icelandic countryside both marred by industry and untouched by man to discover and understand the sound of catastrophe – the sound of ongoing climate change, which in itself can be far more beautiful, and more imaginative, than what it heralds. While sight allows phenomena and things to be encompassed in a static state and in a certain entirety, hearing allows us to understand how they affect and clash with their surroundings. Sound is the consequence of an event that happened in the past and points towards a future now being decided, one that may potentially be inevitable and destructive for us. It cannot yet be seen in the invisible landscapes, but – if we listen carefully – it is already there. The film will be presented by Ivo Bystřičan and producer Tereza Swadoschová, who will lead the discussion after the screening.

fyield brings together leading figures of the Czech and Icelandic independent music scene. Czech musicians Václav Havelka and Kryštof Kříček from the band Please The Trees are joined by Iceland’s Pan Thorarensen, a member of the ambient trio Stereo Hypnosis and founder of the international experimental music festival Extreme Chill, which has been held in Reykjavik since 2010.