Terminal Velocity

Icebreaker - Terminal Velocity

CD released in 1994

Icebreaker are:

James Poke - flute, piccolo, pan-pipes, wind-synthesizer
Katherine Pendry - flute, piccolo, pan-pipes, alto flute
Richard Craig - alto & tenor saxes, bass clarinet
Catherine Shrubshall - soprano, alto & baritone saxes
Emma Fowler - soprano, alto & baritone saxes
John Godfrey - electric guitar, keyboards
Damian le Gassick - keyboards
Tom Armstrong - keyboards
Tracey Goldsmith - accordion
Joanna Parker - violin, keyboards
Audrey Riley - cello, electric cello
Robert Millett - percussion
James Woodrow - electric guitars
Pete Wilson - bass guitars

James Poke - artistic director
John Godfrey - musical director
Ian Mellish - fixer, roadie & accordion button-pusher

with
Alex Neal - percussion
Graham Cole - percussion

This recording was made in the Henry Wood Hall, London, 19-21 September 1993, using DECCA-modified Neumann M50, Neumann TLM 170, Schoeps MK4 and Neumann KM84 microphones and Yamaha SY77, Korg M3R, Emu Systems Proteus 1, Emu Systems Proteus 2, Roland S770 and Roland S750 keyboards. It was remixed digitally on the Neve Capricorn, Penthouse Studio, at Abbey Road, 10-12 November 1993, and at the Decca Recording Centre, 15-16 November 1993 and was monitored on B & W loudspeakers.

Since the formation of Icebreaker in 1989 critics have searched hard for a label to attach to the band and its music. Icebreaker's frenetic energy, visceral but undanceable rhythms, searing virtuosity, confrontational, blasting volume and dynamic stage presence have all contributed to a musical image which cuts across established categories.
Initially, the musicians came together under James Poke and John Godfrey to play music by the 'bad boy' of Dutch music, Louis Andriessen, music widely performed and hugely influential in his native Holland but scarcely known at that time in Britain. Icebreaker's sound evolved from Andriessen's Hoketus, written for the ensemble of that name which he founded in the mid-1970s and scored for four keyboards and two each of panpipes, saxophones, congas, and bass guitars. What appealed about Andriessen was his sidestepping of both the scented-candle aura of American minimalism and the Angst-ridden confusion of much 'serious' contemporary music in favour of a hard-edged rhythmic idiom - uncompromisingly loud, heavy on winds, keyboards and percussion, and distinguished by a clarity of thought and expression. His work is represented on this recording by de Snelheid, originally written for symphony orchestra but arranged by Poke (with Andriessen's enthusiastic approval) for the current Icebreaker line-up.
...
For better or worse, there is something very English about Icebreaker. Not so much the familiar English virtues of restraint and understatement, but rather the manic humour of Monty Python: screwed-up, not terribly house-trained, at times rather loutish. As one reviewer put it, Icebreaker 'don't just - in the language of cocktail parties - break the ice; they smash up the furniture as well'. Titles such as Godfrey's Euthanasia and Garden Implements or Le Gassick's Mad Legs in a Sack show an irreverent attitude to the posturings and the decent etiquette of the contemporary music establishment, and are thoroughly irrelevant to the pieces themselves. And yet Icebreaker's irreverence does not extend to the music they perform, as witnessed by the sheer intensity and relentless perfectionism of their rehearsal process. What has emerged is a band with an aesthetic agenda as subtle as a sledgehammer, and a penchant for music that is irresponsibly loud, relentlessly hyper, fast, edgy, irritating, like an itch that won't go away. The short but fiendish violin cadenza that ends Evol is an example: a gesture of exasperation, a final dissipation of the frustrations and accumulated tensions in the piece.
Icebreaker's creative discomfort is provoked by their ambivalent attitude to just about every musical language around: the result is music that helps define a number of existing borders in the act of crossing them. Cutting through all the ambivalence is an insistence on rhythmic and harmonic material tensile enough to withstand the demands they make in selecting new repertory. (Bob Gilmore)
Tracklisting:

1. Yo Shakespeare {10:45}
composed by Michael Gordon

2. de Snelheid {16:28}
composed by Louis Andriessen (arranged by James Poke)

3. The Archangel Trip {15:57}
composed by Gavin Bryars

4. Evol {8:06}
composed by Damian le Gassick

5. Slow Movement {23:38}
composed by David Lang

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