Icarus

Fake Fish Distribution is out here for purchase via Paypal. The 1,000 versions are being released incrementally. Get your unique version!

The Sonic Acts Festival have announced an epic line up and confirmed that we’ll be playing the Paradiso on a line up that also includes Keith Fullerton-Whitman and Joel Ryan. We’ll also be playing with some kind of fancy new tablet-based musical toys that we’ll be making with STEIM’s Jonathan Reus and Goldsmiths’ Daniel Jones throughout February. This, we think, will be a perfect end to a European winter.

NOTE THE DATE CHANGE – WE HAD FEB 27th UP ON OUR SITE FOR A WHILE.

Check out Sonic Acts here: http://2012.sonicacts.com/

Poster for Icarus’ forthcoming gig at Mayhem, Copenhagen, on Jan 24th, with Zack Christ & Sebastian Winther and Djs Opiate and Badun …

Flyer for Icarus’ forthcoming gig at Südpol, Lucerne, on Jan 27th.

Our album launch date is booked @ Cafe Oto, on Friday Jan 20th, with Inch-Time and BABs, brought to you by Mystery Plays. Subscribe to our GigPress feed on the sidebar and have it in the diary.

Our forthcoming album, ‘Fake Fish Distribution’, will be available on January 30th 6th February 2012 (N.B change of date!). It is our first full studio album since 2005′s ‘I Tweet the Birdy Electric‘ and was composed using parametric techniques, embedded into Ableton Live using the Max for Live add-on, allowing us to mutate the record so that each version that you download will be different from everyone else’s. More on this can be found via the dedicated FFD page and on the STEIM project blog.

We’re putting the final touches to the record now and are getting ready for the release. It has taken quite a long time to get this far, with a lot of help from some very helpful people, but it will be something a bit special. A short tour in Europe in January and February is being put together to promote the record. Dates coming shortly … for news on pre-orders, gigs and more, follow us on Twitter @birdy_electric or sign up to the Not-Applicable mailing list here (we promise this is ultra-low traffic). In the mean time, here’s a sample of FFD version 500:

Fake Fish Distribution – version 500 sampler by Icarus…

Thanks to everyone who came down to the show at Cafe OTO on the 15th and made it such a great evening. We’re off to Copenhagen this weekend for our last show before Ollie returns to Australia, after which Icarus will have a short hiatus until the winter when we will return with a new studio album and hopefully some more live dates. In the mean time, you can now pick up our Split EP with Badun from Bandcamp – Enjoy!

Last two shows of the spring for Icarus are alongside the Danish duo Badun to promote our split EP. Badun make deliciously intricate electronic rhythm music, it’s very special and it’s a great pleasure to get them over to the UK. Next up is Inch-Time, Badun and Icarus @ Cafe OTO this Sunday, May 15th. We love OTO.

Badun / Icarus – ‘Flensburg’ EP – Preview by Icarus…

We set sail this week for three really exciting shows: on Wednesday we visit Cave12 in Geneva, a legendary experimental improv venue; on Saturday we play at Tamirane in Istanbul, where we’re also visiting Bigli University and presenting a workshop to students of the Music School; on Sunday we’re heading to the epic grungeness of the Golden Pudel club in the docks of Hamburg where we play alongside Daedelus (trying not to get too excited about this mythical connection). Next Sunday we play at Cafe Oto back home in London with Badun and Inch-Time, two weeks after that it’s Copenhagen with various greats of Danish electronic music, and that’s the end of our all too ephemeral spring-based stint of touring.

Icarus at Leeds (20th April), Leicester (21st April) and London (28th April) all coming up super-soon. Full tour details here…

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(Thanks again to PRSF for support for our UK shows).

We return to the great Oto on May 15th with the great Badun and Inch-Time. We’re also playing at Elektrowerkz on April 28th as part of a Japan fundraiser. Touring kicks off this Friday 15th April at the Wrong Music night, at Volks in Brighton, followed by the Cube Cinema, Bristol on the 16th. This week we are amassing breaks, noises and thunderous sub-bass.

Our recently released remix of Eclectic Method and Chuck D‘s Outta Sight has finally gained a visual component in the form of Weirdcore/Andrew Benson‘s insanely kaleidoscopic feature-driven video remix…

Chuck D / Eclectic Method – Outta Sight (audio mix by Icarus, video mix by Weirdcore/Andrew Benson) from weirdcore on Vimeo.

Featuring Icarus’ tour mascot, the strange naked mirror-man-marionette…

Icarus tour dates are mostly sorted and approaching rapidly, still hoping to sort out another London show, plus a couple of stragglers.

Note the RSS and iCalendar links at the bottom, so you’ll never miss an Icarus show again.

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Special thanks to PRSF for support with our UK shows, and to Wassim @ The Centrifuge for booking ‘em.

It’s great to be back in touch with Jonny from Eclectic Method after meeting him in 1998 in Bosnia, where we recorded our album Fijaka and he was running DJ workshops and imparting his passion for mashup culture through musical outreach programmes run from Mostar. Twelve years on and it’s no surprise to find him enthusing the denizons of New York with Eclectic Method’s video cut-ups and collaborating with Chuck D from Public Enemy, who he met through a common interest in copyright and its wrongs. Today we revel at a distance in sonic abandon via this nostalgically jump-started remix … to the future! long may it remain as off-kilter as the past!

Outta Sight feat Chuck D (Icarus Remix) by EclecticMethod

Coming soon: A video to our remix made by the mercurial techno evangelists who are Weirdcore.

We’ve just got back from a 3 week residency at STEIM, in the Netherlands which, amongst other things, refers to itself as a “nomad studio”. We’re refraining from talking too much about the project at this stage, but we have just posted a project report on the STEIM project blog. The short and cryptic version is this: our new album will be one composition, but 1000 recordings, each its own variation on the album. To this end, over the past three weeks we have been tangled up in breakpoint functions, the finesses of function interpolation, colourful probability distributions, grey coding binary strings, rendering tracks on multiple computers throughout the night into gigabytes of data, and using a big pad and felt-tip pens to try to get multi-dimensional ideas across space into each other’s 3 dimensional imaginations. We have been exploiting the magic of Max4Live, Emmanuel Jourdan, Dropbox, Stroopwaffles and more RME interfaces than you could carry on a bike.

The Liminal is a new music website that focuses on “the music that others may be blind to”. So it is absolutely plain common sense that they got in touch with us for an interview about Icarus and Not Applicable.

There is also an hour-long mix by us of music from Icarus and other Not Applicable artists, including a number of previews of tracks that will be coming out this year.

01 Not Applicable Mix – Icarus by The Liminal on Mixcloud

A handful of Icarus-related projects involving Ollie and Sam are coming out on the Not Applicable label in the first half of 2011. More details can be found on the Not Applicable website.

We will be playing a one-off gig* at Café OTO on Wednesday 2nd February, 2011, in support of Inch-Time, for the launch of his new album, ‘The Floating World‘. The show also features AM/PM and, of course, Inch-Time. Our remix of the floating world is available on ‘The Floating World Remixes‘. (more …)