Collaged from environmental recordings captured in Antarctica in 2010, »WhiteOut« is Lawrence English’s most evocative set in ages, establishing an isolated, alien narrative that sits between John Carpenter’s »The Thing« and the Aussie veteran’s own milestone album »Viento«.

The coldest, windiest, iciest, and driest place on earth, Antarctica is best known for being remote and inhospitable – something that made »The Thing« so terrifying, even before an alien presence was introduced. And English plays up these fears and misunderstandings on »WhiteOut«, painting a vivid, narrative-driven portrait of the Great White Continent that provides an inverse of 2012’s texturally maximalist »Viento«. He made these recordings at the same time, when he was invited by the Argentine Antarctic Division to make recordings in the ice. »Viento« concentrated on the extreme weather English experienced in Patagonia and on the Marambio and Esperanza bases, when howling storms and blizzards created dense, resonant vibrations and whistling drones. And he’s been sat on the rest of the additional material ever since. “These recordings here speak to the everyday of our incursions into Antarctica,” he explains. “They’re not exceptional, or unique, in that they unfold across much of the continent’s camps and bases moment to moment, depending on the season and location, of course.”

But humdrum in Antarctica is remarkable for those of us who haven’t been trapped in days-long –40 °C storms. And like he did on 2021’s »A Mirror Holds the Sky«, English turns hours of day-to-day normality into a pruned snapshot of rarely encountered reality that documents a landscape most of us will never appreciate. Separating the soundscapes into three “chapters” – the human, the land, and the water – he invites us into surprisingly active terrain, highlighting events that run in parallel. In the first act, rumbling A/C units are offset by echoing footsteps and squeaky doors, and we get to hear the still, but never completely silent, nerve centre of human existence in Antarctica. And on »Thaw« the temperature begins to shift; we’re shuttled from the relative warmth of the indoors into a landscape of cracking ice and chugging helicopter blades, carried through an unfamiliar plain until animal sounds remind us that we’re not completely alone on »The Collapse«.

As the more illustrative elements – loud cries from birds and seals, icy footsteps – slip away, English leaves us with Thomas Köner-like gong clangs, whistling winds, and pattering raindrops, allowing the album to drift off into the waters like an iceberg, no human in sight, before it comes to a satisfyingly placid finale. There are no bells and whistles here, and it’s a relief – »WhiteOut« is a remarkably compelling piece of documentary environmental recording, where the drama’s created by the tiniest, most mysterious details.