How It Was Made: Icarus - Unfold

Bristol duo Icarus has released their new project Unfold. The nine-track distills everything they have built toward over the past few years, honing on in a sound that blends 90’s rave influences, trance and house. They have been bubbling up for the past decade, but now is their time to really break out with Unfold.

We asked the duo to take us inside their studio (where I imagine they will be spending a lot more time these days) to show us the gear used on Unfold. Read on for their How It Was Made.

Pick up your copy of Unfold here and listen now as you learn how they made this.

Moog Voyager:

The Moog provided the bass sounds in a few tracks as its capable of really ballsy, fat sounds. It was also used for the noisy swelling synth sound that you hear on the intro of “Joy.” We made this by running MIDI out of the computer and modulating the cutoff frequency on the Voyager by hand to get a more natural, human sound.

Launchpad Pro:

The Launchpad was a really useful tool for jamming ideas when we were writing. We’d load a vocal or synth part into Ableton’s Simpler, slice it up and map it onto the Launchpad. It was nice to have different options for coming up with ideas in the studio as opposed to always using a keyboard.

Eurorack Modular System:

The bass part in “Rush” was made by modulating Mutable Instruments Plaits with envelopes and LFOs from Pamela’s New Workout. We also used Mutable Instruments Clouds (uBursts) a lot on the record for creating ambient textures and FX. On our track "Unfold" we ran some piano chords through it to make a pad sound that runs throughout and on "Swim" we used it to splice and loop bits of vocal.