ICE at the Southern

by Ryan Ingebritsen

I have worked with ICE as a sound engineer, and sometimes sound designer, for concerts since around 2005. That year also marked the first time ICE performed my music: a work entitled Echoing Your Voice Just Like the Ringing in my Ears.  (Yes, for any of you 90’s roll playing nerds who were wondering, that is a reference to a Nineinchnails song on Pretty Hate Machine)

I now work with ICE when they are in Chicago, recording their concerts and really trying to document this moment in history, as the group is becoming larger than life in many ways… or at least in the way the are approaching new music.  I recorded a Xenakis concert, and more recently a Sarijaho concert they played at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and got goose bumps during both concerts as the headphones enveloped me in pure sonic expressions straight from the guts of the musicians.  I hope that is not too gross a way to describe it, but that is how it was from a pair of ears placed right at the edge of the stage and many feet up.  Xenakis as absolute bliss instead of an exercise in subdivision.

So, that is how I feel about ICE.  I think they are one of the few groups in existence who can really TOUCH the listener with music that is often interpreted distantly and “objectively” (whatever that means in music).  I am not suggesting they engage in any kind of overt romanticizing of the music, but perhaps that they bring a somewhat Baroque sensibility to it.

ICE has also performed on a few projects I have organized, including GPS-trans, a project conceived by my friend and mentor Marek Choloniewski, and a collaboration with the world-renowned painting duo the Zhou Brohters in 2008 entitled New Music Plus Painting.

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