Sonic agencies of climate change: <i>Kalallissut</i> /Greenlandic popular music of global heating

Abstract Sonic agencies of climate change refers to the relational fluxes of human and nonhuman agencies sounding and musicking the climate crisis. This article discusses what understandings of Indigenous onto-epistemologies of the nonhuman in commercial music can contribute to the notion and vice-versa. In Greenland, site of the rapidly melting North Polar Ice Cap, popular song lyrics in Inuit Greenlandic or Kalallissut as well as their music videos and album cover art engage nonhuman aspects of human internal experiences and societal coming-to-terms around global heating. Sonic agencies of climate change is used here to investigate how emotion, affect, protest, and debate through musicking—which music scholarship tends to approach anthropocentrically—navigate the nonhuman as well as human-nonhuman relationalities. Relevant Greenlandic musical contents pose alternatives to an epistemology behind climate change, while their commercialization relies on environmentally destructive industries. Sonic agencies of climate change may be politically, ideologically and otherwise complex and contradictory.