rump recordings artists

Icarus

In 1995 Ollie Bown and Sam Britton, accidentally tuned into a pirate station and split their sides with hysterics at the machine-gun breakbeat frenzy they were soon to learn was called jungle. After the laughter subsided, Sam and Ollie turned their wholehearted attention to the domain of samplers and breakbeats, consuming and producing more or less unfamiliar strains of drum'n'bass, tinged by longer-standing influences such as no-wave and free jazz, psychedelic rock, minimal techno and avant-garde classical music.
The label Hydrogen Dukebox soon took on Icarus' debut recordings and released their first 3 records. In addition to this a series of early frenetic live shows gained Icarus recognition in quirky corners of the dnb-crazed community and a reputation for out of the box experimentation.
'Fijaka' established Icarus's interest in developing a coherent musical vocabulary on an album scale, something which set them aside from the drum and bass community (which was mainly concerned with hard hitting singles and DJs). At the same time Icarus also started experimenting with film and performed their early experimental soundtracks to silent classics.
In 2000 Icarus moved from Hydrogen Dukebox to Output Recordings in search of broader musical horizon and with the release of 'Squid Ink' and 'UL-6' they moved away from the fading limelight of drum'n'bass and looked deeper into sound-design, music concrete and rhythmic experimentation.
Their next two records 'Soviet Igloo' and 'Misfits', was released on their own label Not Applicable with minimal publicity and distribution but a strong emphasis on conception, but in 2004 The Leaf Label released 'I Tweet the Birdy Electric', which made album of the year charts in The Wire and BBC Online.
The release of 'Carnivalesque' in 2005 saw Icarus turning an adaptation of a 30 minute live sketch into a studio-buffed precision product, an approach that has caused the duo to record all their very improvisational livesets ever since.

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