Glacial Drift by Glåsbird

Glåsbird is artist and composer Harry Towell, who has been active under this pseudonym for several years. Initially, this was an anonymous side-project with music released solely on his label Whitelabrecs, but in Spring 2024 Harry revealed his identity through an interview with Kevin Press on The Moderns blog.

Driftworks is delighted to present Glacial Drift. The latest in a long line of releases by Harry as Glåsbird, whose main influence is topographic - landscape and place. Glacial Drift in particular was inspired by a series of photographs from 1938 of the Swiss Alps taken by Peter Maynard’s (fellow label artist) father. These evocative photographs portray glaciers, mountains and valleys showing a very different world. Glacial Drift explores how this landscape may have changed through a series of pieces which chart musical developments at particular points in time since the photographs were taken.

Realising that Samuel Barber’s Adagio For Strings was performed for the first time on the 5th of November 1938, Glåsbird felt a connection with the Modern Classical music that is very much a major inspiration.
Clear themes developed with each track representing a year and studying the techniques, equipment and sound aesthetic for a particularly acclaimed artist, starting with Samuel Barber.

The aim for Glacial Drift was to tell two stories, in parallel to one another; the effects of global warming, accelerated by humans and industry, and secondly, the evolution of Ambient, Avant Garde and Minimalist music over the course of the 86 years since those photographs were taken.

Driftworks is a small, boutique label based in the UK. We specialise in lower case, ambient and minimal music often containing fragmentary melodies and field recordings. We create hand-made, limited special edition CDs for our artists containing ephemera and other delightful objects.