First, it crackles softly. Then it cracks. Walking across the ice is risky. You never know when it will bear or whether it will collapse. In her new project, Erika Stucky takes her audience by the hand and leads them into the glacial world of the Upper Valais Alps. "I'll take you to an ocean of ice where my ancestors have been wandering for a hundred years."

Erika Stucky's new festive program is spooky. On the Aletsch Glacier, the largest sea of ice in the Alps, she has recorded the roaring of rock and water and woven them together. The prayers of the dead from the villages are mysterious, the death knell is ghostly. They hover over the landscape, soaring high... far above the tree line...

Erika Stucky's ICE ORKESTRA is another chapter in her artistic exploration of her Swiss homeland. Born and raised in the San Francisco of the flower power years, she found herself in the middle of the Swiss mountains at the age of nine after her family moved to her country of origin. The cultural differences still fascinate Erika Stucky to this day, so that she constantly picks up and processes new images of her Upper Valais surroundings, never completely forgetting the hippie world of the sixties.

For her alpine symphony, Stucky is working for the first time with We Spoke, an experimental, contemporary music collective from Geneva. For the Ice Orkestra, she has engaged Julien Annoni and Serge Vuille, who accompany Stucky with vibraphone, marimba, drums, percussion and electronics.