AlbuM

This is my eighth album of Antarctic music and seventh collaboration with Michael Stibor.  It continues an interest in and affection for Antarctica that began with my first visit in 1993 as a tourist and continued through four more trips to the Antarctic Peninsula, the Ross Sea area and along the coast of Western Antarctica.  For this album, we continue with a mixture of styles and themes that cover a range of topics related to and inspired by Antarctica.  This is more fully described in the album notes that follow.  I continue to be indebted to my musical collaborator, Michael Stibor, for his compositional, arrangement, keyboard and guitar skills.

      –  Valmar Kurol, Montreal, Canada, September 2025

This is our seventh album about Antarctica.  Most people would stop at one.  Some might even question the need for any.  But we kept going.  Valmar and I have once again combined a range of styles – jazz, pop, orchestral, funk, electronic – to explore a place that has no recording studios, no concert halls, and very few paying customers.  Still, the scenery is nice, and the penguins don’t complain.  We hope you enjoy it.

There’s a kind of silence in Antarctica that’s hard to describe – not empty, but alive in its stillness.  With each album, we try to translate that silence into sound: echoes of wind across ice, distant memories of warmth, imagined histories beneath the ice.  This seventh journey feels more like a dream than a document – fluid, abstract, and strangely human.  I’m proud of the ground we’ve covered here, and grateful for the chance to keep discovering new corners of a continent that still feels, in many ways, untouched.  Valmar and I keep digging into the snowdrifts of inspiration, and somehow, there’s always something strange and beautiful buried underneath.  The further we go, the more mysterious it becomes. 

      –   Michael Stibor, Montreal, Canada, September 2025