Terra Australis Incognita

Terra Australis Incognita is born out of reading some short stories by Jorn Riel, a Danish writer who lived for 16 years in the most isolated and impervious areas of Greenland in the first half of the 20th Century, at close quarters with the hunters who originally lived there. He was very young when he left home, and for many years he shared his fears, life experiences and thoughts with that particular kind of people. His only way to keep in touch with the rest of the world was a ship, the Veslemari, that reached them once every eight months in order to bring food, weapons, ammunitions and some other non-essential goods, as well as to collect the valuable hides so severely hunted during the long northern months. But other than wonderful tales of adventure, those short stories are also very accurate observations of the psychological reactions of these men (and the author himself) to the long periods of isolation in that endless and lonely desert of ice.

Terra Australis Incognita tells the tale of Jorn Riel’s inner journey while living in a hard and hostile environment such as the Inlandsis of Greenland, and of the immense difficulties of adapting the body and spirit that allowed him to explore the many dark recesses hidden within the human soul.
Places where men were so used to loneliness, which sometimes could last for months, that at times they felt a strong sense of fear at the mere sight of another human being, like a very strong form of anthropophobia.
Places where they developed the strange habit of handing down the “right” of thinking about a Woman: the Cold Virgin. That “right of thinking” was kept under very strict rules: every man had a pre-determined period of time during which he could revel in the thought of this “Woman”; this lapse of time had a beginning and an end; after that, the “thought” passed on to another hunter, and so on. The possibility that two men could “possess” the Cold Virgin at the same time wasn’t even contemplated.
Places where night and day passed once every six months, totally upsetting the natural biorhythm of man and leading to a severe lack of balance, both biologically and behaviourally.

With this work, LCHM has tried to recreate, by means of sound, the lights and shadows of these great and unknown men who lived extraordinary experiences by relying on their own forces alone, on their adaptability and on their will to survive in an age when you didn’t have much to begin with.

CD samples at :
http://soundcloud.com/lchm/sets/terra-austalis-incognita/

Tracklist :
1 Guess grave 7:42
2 Artic night 6:34
3 Inlandsis 4:52
4 Ghost of the hunter 4:04
5 The cold virgin 7:50
6 Mad madsen 6:35
7 Antropophobia 8:17
8 Veslemari 5:59

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