ICE CREAM with SCOTT HARDWARE and MAN MADE HILL at Smiling Buddha, Saturday (April 23), 9 pm. $8-$12. See listing.
The songs on Ice Cream‘s debut album, Love, Ice Cream (out April 22 on Bad Actors, Inc.), are bleakly futurist yet soulful: moody, spacious tableaux with strong melodic underpinnings and Carlyn Bezic and Amanda Crist‘s deeply interwoven voices.
Ice Cream’s unique sound is well suited to both the post-punk loft scenes of the recent past and the inevitable Blade Runneresque dystopia of the near future. Bezic, who handles string duties alongside keyboardist Crist, nerded out with us about the foundational concepts – and gear – behind the album.
Collaboration = negotiation
“In most of our songs, Amanda takes the trebly, melodic vocal parts and I take the spoken, bassier parts,” Bezic says. “In instrumentation that’s kind of similar, too. The Moog is responsible for a lot of the melodies and hooks, and the bass is in the rhythm section. But the bass can be melodic, too. I feel like a huge part of our sound is how those things weave in and out and switch roles.”
The right tools for the job are the tools at hand
“About 50 per cent of our gear was free or cheap,” Bezic says. “You can make anything with anything.”
For instance, Ice Cream have long deployed a boom box onstage to amplify the endoskeletal drum machine rhythms that drive the songs.
“It’s like adding overdrive or delay to any beat, but it has a more organic feel, in a way. There’s an EQ on the boom box, which helps because each beat is affected by it differently.”
The effective low-tech approach can be heard on the song Material. “The opening few bars of the beat, you can really hear the hiss of the boom box. When there’s space in the instrumentation, atmospheric qualities like that come to the forefront. It creates a world.”
Warm in sound, cold in temperament
“That’s pretty Ice Cream to me,” says Bezic. “In a way, ‘warm’ is the form while ‘cold’ is the content. On the song BP we’ve got the bass through a wah pedal, which adds a real human groove. Like, you hear the human foot working it. The Moog is basically mimicking a siren, which is kind of unsettling and alienating and evokes danger in a really simple way.
“On Veronica, we keep the tones warm through the atmosphere that analog gear can provide, while singing a love song to a mannequin. Being in love with a mannequin is a detached state, and a mannequin is a cold, emotionless, lifeless thing. Our delivery is sort of sensual but detached, I’d say.”
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