If you’ve never heard of Antarctia, there’s probably a very good reason. Formed in New York, the band were together just long enough to release an EP in 1998 and their only full-length in 1999. They would break up less than a year later.

Each release was named after its length; 21:03 and 81:03 respectively. The music contained within those cheekily-titled discs has been decribed as dream pop, atmospheric pop, shoegaze, and while all of those categories might be said to apply, none of them does so completely.

Do you remember arriving at a party, and being outside the house and hearing the music playing from within? You know it’s loud, because you can hear it out on the street, but heard from without it is muffled, tamped down, flattened out. Mono. And even if it’s punk rock or hip hop, when heard from outside the house, it sounds warm and gentle. Because all the layers of drywall or wood or brick have transformed it into something else, something new. Something special, only for those out on the perimeter.

That’s what Antartica sounds like. That strange music at the edge of a party. It’s what I imagine one would hear at the event horizon of a black hole, if only sound could travel in space.

81:03 opens with a track entitled “Absence” which brings to mind cheery 1980’s snyth pop for about 40 seconds, until Eric Richter’s voice pushes through the mix and one is forcibly reminded of Kevin Shield’s similar struggle against the wailing of his own guitar. As with My Bloody Valentine, one needn’t try too hard to make out exactly the words being sung. The human voice is not the intended focal point, but another color in the band’s vast palette.

The nine minute epic “Hallucinus” weds brooding keyboards with crisp guitar and spastic handclaps, while frozen seas shimmer and ghosts bemoan their condition. The band’s name is fitting. Indeed, their sound was being described as “glacial” and “otherworldly” before anyone outside of Iceland had heard of Sigur Rós. And while I won’t pile on the hyperbole of “God crying tears of gold in Heaven” perhaps it wouldn’t be too much to imagine Jesus getting just a little misty-eyed.

Obvious references and forebearers include Pink Floyd, New Order, Joy Division. But unlike any of those bands – well except maybe Joy Division – Antartica lived such a brief life, an eyeblink in the music world, that they were lost before they were ever really found. Their tracks covered by the unforgiving snowfall of an inhospitable world.

Bands like Antarctica are the reason I write about music. To brush away some of that snow and uncover something magnificent and worth sharing.

(81:03 is still in print and can be found online at the usual outlets.)

Antarctica – Absence

Antarctica – Hallucinus