About the Project:
Sustain Music & Nature, a national nonprofit that makes music a force for nature, partnered with Alaska’s USFWS to create Refuge Alaska, a 10 minute film featuring stunning videography set to evocative music composed by four U.S. based independent artists: Sam Kassirer (Josh Ritter and the Royal City Band, Board Member - Sustain Music & Nature), Akie Bermiss (Lake Street Dive), Matt Douglas (The Mountain Goats), and Derry deBorja (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit).
Unable to travel or gather during the height of the pandemic, the composer-musicians met across time and space to virtually connect with northern places most had never visited in person. An assemblage of video captured in previous years by multiple videographers became the inspiration for an artwork of music and film. Four chapters take the audience through the air over vast landscapes, across the land with close floral and faunal encounters, beneath the water with fish and marine mammals, and finally into the winged world of birds.
Alaska’s 16 National Wildlife Refuges span from the edges of the high Arctic to the outer islands of the Aleutians, and provide some of the best places in the world for wildlife and people to thrive. These are the homelands of Alaska Native peoples from time immemorial, and we honor their centuries of stewardship and deep connections with these lands."
Sustain Music & Nature
Sustain Music & Nature is a nonprofit that makes music a force for nature. Using the emotional hook of music and cultural sway of bands, Sustain generates new audiences for our public lands. Sustain produces music videos for our national parks, wildlife refuges and forests, hosts Trail Session hikes and concerts, and produces a podcast exploring musician relationships to nature and creativity.
US Fish & Wildlife Service Alaska
At the US Fish & Wildlife Service Alaska we are shared stewards of our nation’s last true wild places and world renowned natural resources. The lands and waters of this place we call home nourish a vast and unique array of fish, wildlife and people. We cultivate a reverent awareness and respect for all things, from Alaska’s smallest plants and most iconic animals to its diverse communities and cultures. Today and for generations to come, we live with, live from, enjoy and learn from the wildness of this awe-inspiring land and the people who love it.
Sam Kassirer
Sam Kassirer is a Boston based record producer, composer, and touring musician who has produced critically-acclaimed albums for artists like Josh Ritter, Lake Street Dive, Langhorne Slim, and David Wax Museum. He is the founder and creative head of Great North Sound Society, a retreat-style recording studio he built in an old farmhouse in Maine. As a composer, Sam recently scored the documentary film In the Game (Kartemquin films). He has also remained a member of Josh Ritter’s touring band for the past 12 years, performing on The Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Matt Douglas
Matt Douglas is a woodwinds player, multi-instrumentalist, and member of the Mountain Goats. After graduating from NYU, Matt went to Central Europe on a Fulbright Grant to study Hungarian folk music. After two years of working in Budapest, Matt headed to Raleigh, NC, where he continues to live with his wife and three children. In addition to being a member of the band the Mountain Goats, Matt has had the privilege of collaborating with artists like Josh Ritter, Bon Iver, Sylvan Esso, Hiss Golden Messenger, Superchunk, and Ani Difranco.
Derry deBorja
Derry deBorja is a Grammy Award-winning musician and composer living in Nashville, Tennessee. He began his musical career in Washington, DC as keyboardist for the psychedelia-tinged Americana band Canyon, where he caught the ear of Uncle Tupelo/Son Volt founder Jay Farrar. deBorja joined Son Volt in 2005, touring in support of Okemah And The Melody Of Riot and contributing to the recording of The Search. In 2007, Derry became a full-time member of Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit. He has appeared on the majority of Isbell’s albums, including 2013’s Southeastern and the more recently released Reunions and has contributed to recent recordings by Morgan Wade, Bahamas, Joe Pug, Josh Ritter, and Ian Noe.
Akie Bermiss
Akie Bermiss is a singer/songwriter, pianist, composer, arranger, and emerging solo artist. A Brooklyn native raised in a musical household full of jazz and politics, he got his start singing in church, and now explores sounds in neo-soul, funk, contemporary jazz, alternative rock, and hip hop. Akie is a musician, songwriter or featured vocalist with a collective of upstart groups such as FutureSoul band Aabaraki, the Screaming Headless Torsos, Miri Ben-Ari (the Hip Hop Violinist), and Rap sensation Soul Khan. In 2018, he officially became a member of the veteran indie multi-genre band Lake Street Dive, on their release Free Yourself Up. He also founded the Akie Bermiss Trio, independently released his first self-titled solo EP (on Rockwood Records), and performs frequently at venues like Rockwood Music Hall, The Falcon, BAM Cafe, and Wild Birds.
Reflections (artist statements)
From Sam Kassirer, composer for the aerial chapter
Music with picture is one of my favorite art forms. What you're hearing is a live reflection of, and guide for, what the viewer is seeing. In addition, you are also experiencing this piece as a unique point of view through the artist's lens. "Refuge Alaska" is a meditation and reflection on the beauty, value, fragility and importance of not only Alaska but of all of our natural surroundings.
The concept for this project came to me during a meeting with Sustain Music and Nature in the height of the pandemic in early 2021. How can we continue to raise awareness for public lands when we can't physically be together? How can we continue to be connected to nature when many living in cities can't even get to an airport or train station? The musician-composers for this project come from four different states including Massachusetts, Tennessee, New York and North Carolina. Over Zoom meetings, we chose who would compose for each "chapter" and also decided to have musical segues where one composer would pick up where the other left off, a musical baton handoff overlapping all four works to produce one piece of music.
Views from far distances of our planet, be it of a river, a mountain or a forest, puts anyone’s perspective in check. It's almost a subconscious feeling. When I see these aerial points of view of Alaska, I am at once taken back by how big and how small our world is at the same time. The sounds I’m using in this first piece attempt to mirror not only the breadth and depth of this wondrous land, but also how tiny and fragile each subject is in reality.
As a traveler, and touring musician I've been to every single state in our country except for Alaska, which made composing for it all the more dreamlike. I sincerely hope to visit in person one day.
From Akie Bermiss, composer for the land flora and fauna chapter
I have never been to Alaska, but I have always longed to visit. I’ve spent my entire life in a city of metal and concrete and people packed in, so something about the remote beauty, the wide open space and the expansive wildness has always been alluring to me.
We often portray wilderness as a quiet place but it can be quite loud – “wild” is in the name, after all. I think of that cacophony as a kind of chorus, from the sounds of animals, to leaves in the wind, to rushing water, and I attempted to emulate that sound of natural discord and harmony.
From Matt Douglas, composer for the underwater chapter
There’s something fitting about a wind instrument expressing the motion of an underwater creature. Maybe it’s the juxtaposition of the two things... something that depends on air versus something that wouldn’t survive out of water?
There’s also a 2020/2021 parallel in the composition, but maybe the music expresses that better than I can in words. Repetition, simplicity, joy, but a thread of sadness running through it. It could also reflect the work of conservation: hopeful, but with some grief at the same time. I have yet to travel to Alaska, but this project has given me a resolve to change that.
From Derry deBorja, composer for the winged worlds chapter
The landscape of Alaska can be overwhelming. Nothing drives this point home like the first time you stand at the foot of a glacier, and can’t judge how close or far away it is. Something about the magnitude makes it a difficult estimation for our human perception.
Composing music for Refuge Alaska reminded me of that initial sense of awe, but it also afforded me the opportunity to take a closer look at the creatures that inhabit this extraordinary landscape. There is an inherent sense of drama and romanticism in the panoramic scenes of birds soaring across the sky, but every close up of these same animals hints at a sense of personality, determination, and character you might find while observing people on a street corner. I tried to capture this duality within my score, and found a comforting sense of familiarity within these wilds in the process.
My time spent scoring this film has narrowed my scope from the macro of Alaska’s humbling vastness to the lively and often comical microcosm of bird life nestled within the stillness. Looking onward to future trips to Alaska, it would be a disservice to myself to overlook this reassuring lesson in balance nature has to offer. There is a beauty on all sides.
Project Credits
Producers:
Sustain Music & Nature
Creative Director:
Sam Kassirer
Original Compositions:
Sam Kassirer
Akie Bermiss
Matt Douglas
Derry deBjora
Audio Mastering:
Dan Cardinal & Dimension Sounds Studio
Videography:
Ian Shive
Gerret Vyn
Katrina Liebich/USFWS
Danny Hernandez/USFWS
National Conservation Training Center/USFWS