In March 2006, on CBC Radio, As It Happens interviewed a man in Sweden who composes music to be performed on instruments made of ice. Then they played some of the music, which was indeed icy and tinkly, and the strings (was that a harp?) were vibratory and the "brass" (ice horns resting on ice plinths, I think) was glassy. I spent a whole morning trying to download the audio file and play it on my computer, but there's something wrong with the file and after many tries I lost patience and could feel my self-respect seeping away. If anyone at cbc.ca is reading this, please fix the file-it's the one for the last third of the show on March 17, 2006. A couple of interesting ice-music links turned up with audio files that do work properly. The Iceman I website of Terje Isungset-who might even be the guy interviewed on CBC; I didn't write down his name at the time (how many ice musicians can there be?)-has some good examples of ice harp, trumpet and percussion, and photographs of men in toques performing at the "Ice Hotel." An archival web page from the Third Coast International Audio Festival sponsored by Chicago Public Radio includes a short piece from 1999 by Gregory Whitehead of the "Laboratory of Innovation and Acoustic Research," in which the sounds of brass instruments collected in ice cubes by freezing are released to the accompaniment of what sounds like one of those ice-cube trays with a lever popping out cubes. Whitehead was inspired no doubt by the literary tradition of frozen sounds dating back to Plutarch (see Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, "frozen words") and brilliantly described by Rabelais in the sixteenth century (Gargantua and Pantagruel, 4, LVI, "How Among the Frozen Words"): "He then threw us on the deck whole handfuls of frozen words, which seemed to us like your rough sugar-plums, of many colours, like those used in heraldry; some words gules (this means also jests and merry sayings), some vert, some azure, some black, some or (this means also fair words); and when we had somewhat warmed them between our hands, they melted like snow, and we really heard them, but could not understand them, for it was a barbarous gibberish." Thoughts of ice music, and particularly the preservation of sounds in ice, lead naturally in this country to thoughts of ice photography, as practised by Matthew Wheeler of Fort McLeod, B.C. Wheeler makes lenses from ice and then attaches them to cameras and takes pictures with (through) them. His work appeared in Geist No 31, and I think I recall that his first experiments were carried out in winter, but later summer experiments (speedy events) were equally successful.