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A re-mastered release of Icebreaker's breakout 1994 recording. Terminal Velocity is a must-have for fans of modern contemporary music.
“Unabashedly virtuosic” –The New York Times
“Adrenalin- pumping tour de force” –Gramophone
“A harmonic carnival of battling textures, symphonic discombobulations, and noicy innovations, all delivered with the visceral force of the best rock ‘n roll.” -Boston Herald
About Icebreaker:
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. Rhythm is the most immediate of their explicit concerns, and in particular rhythmic dissonance: irregular rhythms, sudden, precise tempo changes, simultaneous different meters in different instruments or instrumental groups. One of Icebreaker's strengths is a virtuosity of ensemble rhythm, always achieved without a conductor. Evol, for instance, makes use of two basic rhythmic ideas, both of them apparently unnotatable, that le Gassick had come up against in a traditional jazz context. In attempting to pin down what it was that fascinated him about them he realised that both could be written down, albeit in a highly intricate way: the first rhythm is notated as five beats in the time of seven, and the second, rather tongue-in-cheek, in a time signature of 59/48 (a fraction shorter than a 5/4 bar). Bringing them off in performance, however, is more a question of feel than of metronomic precision. The whole point is not to square them out to the familiar jazz rhythms to which they approximate, since that would destroy the compelling, rather asthmatic rhetoric that results.
supported by 39 fans who also own “Terminal Velocity”
This is stunning.
Everything about it is superb: the composition, the playing, the recording. To hear the violin played with a glass-cutting purity, and to hear the melodies unfurl one not at a time is a sublime experience. This is immaculately crafted music, with a power and control that belies it monophonic delicacy.
Easily my top modern classical release of 2018 Michael Mueller
supported by 38 fans who also own “Terminal Velocity”
Wow, those are breathtaking compositions! Mostly, they belong to the contemporary classical category, with very strong - and quite fascinating - post-minimalist influences. Occasionally, borderlines to other genres are crossed, most notably in "forced march", with its rock-orientated drums and guitar parts. Sven B. Schreiber (sbs)