Icarus - An Ever Growing Meridional Entertainment Transgression At The Edge Of The Multiverse

Icarus, comprising Ollie Bown and Sam Britton, have been described as a pair of young tearaways let loose in the sound labs, like delinquent chemistry students using test tubes, liquids and bunsen burners in the hope of creating explosions.There is a wonderful air of creative mischief about the duo.They channel the spirit of electronica denizens like Paradox, European outliers like the late Pita (Peter Rehberg), Aphex Twin in all his facetious, windowlicking glory and The Orb, like them at once beautifully grandiose and wittily self- deprecating. The title of their ninth and latest album, An Ever-Growing Meridional Entertainment Transgression At The Edge Of The Multiverse, recorded between London and Sydney, is an unabashed homage to The Orb’s epic “A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld”, from their debut album.

Icarus don’t merely imitate The Orb but use them as a jumping off point for quantum leaps and wormholes of their own, from infinity into the beyond. Take “Mazda Bogo Friendee”, with its fast cut, gamelan electronica, grasshopper disco, with cirrus shafts of reverberant electronics flooding its skies. From there a random skip to “I’m Like The Nutty Professor”, whose sampled voices are like holographic fantasies of the faintly familiar,TV broadcasts that are well on their way to Saturn.

The field of activity of the pieces an An Ever-Growing . . . is positively Breugelian (any coincidence given their moniker, and Breugel’s own vast depiction of The Fall Of Icarus, the mythological figure’s descent a mere detail in the background?).Tracks like “Collectable Woodland Animals Armed With Heavy Weaponry” with its impossibly rapidfire windchime percussion, are simultaneist, accelerationist,Tex Avery cartoon-like in their manic mayhem, an ever-shifting tableau of wildlife activity, free jazz extremism rendered in electronics. Here, as elsewhere, light, metallic percussion, triggers a dance of tiny, granular details, pixels, skipping about like popcorn on a hotplate, mingling, colliding, sparkling, rebounding. Massive synth barrages bull into the china chop of Icarus’s delicate arrangements of rhythms – perfectly organised chaos, an ordered illusion of total rhythmical disorder as balletic combat ensues.

An Ever Growing... marks a significant milestone for Icarus and the artists’ collaborative process, as they reflect:

"We’ve been making music together since we were 15 – now into a fourth decade. It’s natural we do so with bigger breaks in between, and this has been a particularly big break, but it’s essential to our being that we continue our music production dialogue.

The album was made by remote collaboration between London and Sydney, although most of the arrangement work was done with us sitting together in the same place. It was started a very long time ago. Other projects took precedence while the tracks rested as loosely arranged sketches. As with many of our projects, there’s a moment with a track where you can either double down and get deep in to working it into shape, or you can step back and say “there’s beauty in these rough edges”. The tracks of this album went both ways. 'Canaletto Soup' settles around one singular progression of a drum solo, against a minimalist break backdrop. 'Mazda Bongo Friendee' is shaped in a million hyper edits, endlessly unsettled. 'Lemsip Max Relief' is a docile pause. 'Gandalf Speedway' is a stoppy starty orchestration of breaks and bass stabs. Many traditional Icarus tropes revisited." (Ollie Bown)