In Norway (them’s my peeps!) there’s an annual music festival where all the instruments are made mostly or entirely of ice. Look for the cello. That’s right, a cello.
For more info: icemusicfestival.no. Or watch this news piece.
Here in the U.S., there was a University of Michigan ice percussion concert in 2011.
Cool. Pun intended.
So apparently a woman slipped on the ice and it made a cool sound, which gave her percussionist husband the idea to write and perform a piece for this frozen lake in Siberia. The ensemble is Ethnobeat. The lake is Lake Baikal, which at one mile deep and 25 million years of age is the oldest and deepest freshwater lake in the world, and also the largest by volume. (Another interesting tidbit: there’s an annual marathon held entirely on the frozen lake.)
I noticed some comments on the video about how it sounds fake. Giving it a really close listen, in my opinion it’s the real deal, although they do seem to have “cheated” by layering on overdubs. In other words, it’s not all performed at once, live, on camera. But it does appear to be real, and that’s pretty awesome. You can read more about the group and their experience on the lake in the Siberian Times.