Blog

Russell glacier, at the edge of Greenland’s vast ice sheet, sounds as if it’s crying: moans emanate from deep within the slowly but inexorably melting ice. Andy Ferguson, one half of dance duo Bicep, walks around in its towering shadow recording these eerie sounds. “Everyone comes back changed,” he says of Greenland. “Seeing first-hand climate change happening like this.”

It’s April 2023 and, in the wake of Bicep’s second album Isles cementing them as one of the leading electronic acts globally, Ferguson has travelled to Greenland as part of a project to collaborate with Indigenous musicians and bring the momentous struggle of this region – and even the planet – into focus.

The project will take two years to come to fruition but next month sees the release of Bicep’s first soundtrack and accompanying film Takkuuk, pronounced tuck-kook. It’s an Inuktitut word that came from throat singing duo Silla, one of the Indigenous collaborators: “It translates to literally ‘look’ but has the connotation that you’re urging someone to look at something closely,” says Silla’s Charlotte Qamaniq. “The Arctic climate is changing rapidly so in the context of the project it’s: ‘look, the adverse effects of climate change are obvious.’ But it’s also: ‘hey, look how cool Inuit culture is!’”

I join Ferguson on this first trip along with representatives from EarthSonic, a non-profit organisation dedicated to raising awareness about the climate crisis through art projects. Ferguson’s Bicep partner Matt McBriar stays home ahead of the birth of his first child.

When we land at Kangerlussuaq airport, first opened as a US airbase in the second world war, it’s -10C, bright and crisp. Ferguson is staying with our driver Evald who, on learning that Ferguson and I are Man United fans, exclaims: “Manchester United is my religion! Old Trafford is my church!” His home has a huge Lego model of the stadium. Across the next week we see the northern lights – in Inuit myth, it’s dead souls playing ball with a walrus’s head – and ride dogsleds and snowmobiles, but there’s a sobering tone to the beauty and adventure.

Russell glacier is a 20km journey by four-wheel drive on a rough dirt road. The ice sheet covers 80% of the country, but loss of ice from Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has quadrupled since the 90s due to climate change, and is the principal driver of rising sea levels. Scientists predict if the world continues on a course towards 2.5C heating it will take us beyond a tipping point for both ice sheets, resulting in a catastrophic sea level rise of 12 metres. Standing under a vast glacier that is hundreds of thousands of years old, but which could disappear within my daughters’ lifetime, is discombobulating.

Next morning it’s on to Sisimiut for Arctic Sounds, a showcase for music from across the Arctic region and beyond. Sisimiut is Greenland’s second city, home to 5,000, and a thriving metropolis compared with Kangerlussuaq. Rock and metal are the most popular music, alongside rap and other Indigenous music and the standout acts include an incendiary performance by Greenlandic rapper Tarrak. “Seeing Tarrak perform was so powerful,” Ferguson says, with “everyone chanting in this language I’d never heard before. It felt punk. It’s rare to see that nowadays when everything is so homogenised.”

The project is allowing Bicep to flex different musical muscles. Playing a simultaneously melancholic and euphoric style of tech-house and electronica, Bicep broke through in the mid-2010s. Their track Glue became a ubiquitous rave anthem among gen Z, and led to the success of Isles, which reached No 2 in the UK charts and earned them two Brit award nominations. Everything was rosy, but it was, in Ferguson’s words, “all sugar, no sour”, so they created alter egos Chroma and Dove to show their harder, headier side. The Arctic was an opportunity to challenge themselves again.

After Ferguson returned from Greenland, the first thing Bicep did was construct a drum kit from ice samples and other field recordings of local sounds including husky chains, then created demos, “really just chord structures we know we can write around” and sent them to the Indigenous artists. They didn’t expect to get almost full songs in return, but on hearing what came back, the duo realised “we needed to step back and not be the focal point”. A gig on a glacier had been one initial mooted idea, but the Greenland trip made it obvious such a gig would be “tone deaf”, says Ferguson. Through conversations with Indigenous artists, “it became clear this needed to be us shining a light on them”.

At times, progress seemed suitably glacial, but eventually a collection of Indigenous artists from Greenland and the wider Arctic region recorded their contributions at Iceland Airwaves festival in Reykjavík in November 2023, where many of them were in town performing, including Tarrak, Silla, vocalist Katarina Barruk and more.

When I catch up with Ferguson and meet his Bicep-mate McBriar in late 2024, they’re buzzing about the results, and by late May, I’m finally able to hear the full thing in their Shoreditch studio. From the first bars of opener Sikorsuit, featuring Greenlandic indie band Nuija, it’s clear the duo have managed to pull myriad styles and dialect into a cohesive whole. “It doesn’t sound anything like us – and it doesn’t sound like them,” McBriar says. “That’s what you hope to achieve from a collaboration.”

Tarrak collaboration Taarsitillugu opens with a sparse breakbeat and becomes a full-on rave banger, while on her track Dárbbuo, Barruk sings in Ume Sámi, an endangered Uralic language spoken by fewer than 20 people. “I went in to the studio and just poured my heart out because of the tragic state the world is in,” she says, “then Matt and Andy worked their magic.”

There was synchronicity, despite different languages. “It shows a strong connection between us Indigenous sister and brothers,” explains Barruk, who is Swedish. “Without me knowing takkuuk means look, I created lyrics which ask the other person to vuöjnniet, to see, so one doesn’t need to feel so alone. Alone in the fight for our lands, our ways of living, our language, culture and taking care of the Earth.”

As the project developed it was clear it needed context, so Bicep asked Zak Norman, who designs their brilliant on-stage visuals, to create an immersive installation. Norman worked with Charlie Miller, a documentary film-maker who went on the original Greenland trip, on a film that introduces the artists and explores the displacement and marginalisation of their communities, cultures and language. Norman used adapted infrared cameras to give the footage otherworldly pink and purple hues, reminiscent of Richard Mosse’s 2013 video artwork The Enclave. The film is a series of vignettes for each track, and it certainly deepens the music, with eerie landscapes layered with interviews. The work will premiere on the giant wraparound screens at London’s Outernet next month, before touring venues and festivals across the world.

The project has taken on yet another hue in the wake of Donald Trump’s recent expansionist proclamations. “It’s a circus,” says Tarrak. “The first time Trump asked to buy Greenland [during his first. term as president] we took it as a joke. Now I can see there’s some seriousness – but it’s still just weird, in 2025, to try and buy a country. I know they’re more interested in what’s under the ground than the people, but we have to be smart about it as Greenlanders, stick together and be aware of people trying to divide us.”

Bicep experienced their own existential crisis when McBriar had to have surgery for a large tumour on his brain’s pituitary gland last year, from which he’s thankfully made a good recovery. They’re now deep into their third album proper, though it won’t see daylight from their basement studio for at least another year. “We wrote [Isles] pre-pandemic so it’s a complete different world now. With Chroma we wanted to get that aggression out and cleanse ourselves of what we wanted to do, just straight club tracks. Now I think we’re coming full circle.”

How will you judge the success of Takkuuk, I ask. “You can’t quantify awareness,” says Ferguson. “If it starts people on a journey to learn more about Greenland then it’s achieved something.

“It’s easy to switch off with climate change, I switch off myself sometimes,” he continues. “But if you start telling the story in different ways, different narratives, ways people can visualise it, at least it’s a start. Because for the next generation it’s going to be the focal part of their life.”

Hello and welcome to part 86,747,398,464 of the continuing cataloguing via television documentary of the apparently infinite series Ways in Which Largely Men Terrorise Largely Women and Prevent Countless Millions of Them from Living Their Lives in Freedom and Contentment. This one comprises two episodes and is entitled To Catch a Stalker.

It comes from the corporation’s most youth-oriented arm, BBC Three, which mandates a telegenic presenter better versed in sympathy with the programme’s interviewees than interrogation of wider issues, and who has usually come up through the ranks of reality TV rather than journalism. Here, it’s Zara McDermott (Love Island, Made in Chelsea, The X Factor: Celebrity), who previously fronted entries in the infinite series on “revenge porn”, rape culture and eating disorders.

We meet survivors (although this suggests their ordeals are at an end, which for none of them is the case – but to call them victims would be to diminish what McDermott rightly emphasises as their extraordinary strength and endurance) of different forms of stalking.

Jen has endured the obsessive attentions of a man with whom she briefly crossed professional paths during her work for a recruitment company. It began with a few friendly texts and rapidly escalated to bombardment at all hours with insistent messages about their imminent relationship (“I am the guy you’re looking for. You just don’t recognise it”), naked pictures of himself and – as Jen continued not to respond to this stranger – fury. He repeatedly parked in places she was likely to pass and when the police eventually became involved – which has led to four convictions and three prison sentences for the man – they found multiple searches on his computer for pornographic lookalikes of Jen. She is now counting down the days until he is released from his latest stint in jail with dread. As McDermott says: “I don’t know how she sleeps at night.” It’s likely that she doesn’t. Jen shakes with nerves and has a terrible hunted look about her – because that is exactly what is happening to her. She is the prey of a predator who apparently cannot be stopped.

No more, it seems, than any of them can with the current paltry tools at the law’s disposal – presuming you can find someone willing to wield them in the first place. All the women interviewed speak of police reluctance to take their experiences seriously.

Twenty-year-old Isabel, who has moved five times to try to escape the terrifying attentions of her ex-boyfriend, no longer bothers to call the police when she sees a man, whom she assumes to be him, watching her from the alleyway behind her latest home, because they dropped her case when the original investigating officer left. “If you don’t help me, he’s going to kill me,” she told them. Apparently it fell on closed ears. Maybe they thought she was hysterical. Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe you can think of a good enough reason for ignoring a young woman and her toddler trapped in their home because a man has decided he will not let her go. “He knows what he’s done,” she says. “And he knows he’s got away with it. So what is he going to do next?” The best safety plan a charity has been able to give her if he forces his way into her home is to drop from her balcony to the car park roof below and from there to the ground – she will not be able to take her son with her – then contact a neighbour or flag down a passing car.

Victims’ (sufferers’, survivors’) family members attest to the fear and anxiety that stalkers induce in them all. Next week, the remit expands to consider the effects of cyberstalking (“Just ignore it” seems to be the most popular recommendation), and continues to document more women’s experiences with the flesh-and-blood kind of stalker, who message their targets 500 times a day and draw their fingers across throats from afar (far enough that they do not get returned to prison for breaching non-molestation orders), and so on and appallingly on.

It is a documentary designed to raise awareness rather than provide answers, but you do long for a little examination of context; for someone to ask whether this would be so prevalent without, say, an existing culture of male entitlement, or within a society that valued women’s lives and freedom as highly as anyone else’s. If we didn’t have a police force known to be as riddled with bad apples and systemic sexism as it is. If, if, if.