Since 2008, the Intercontinental Music Lab has produced five albums. They’ve all been produced in the same way. We came up with a concept or theme for an album, then asked people to choose subjects around that theme and compose some music. The theme for our first album was science. Our musicians composed instrumental pieces of music about scientists or aspects of science. Once the backing tracks were completed we swapped the tunes online and composed lyrics and recorded vocals over each others tracks, taking the subjects chosen by the musicians as inspiration. These techniques have led to some really successful collaborations.
Our latest release is Mysteries Of The Unexplained.
Mysteries Of The Unexplained
For this album we explored the worlds frequented by the wondrous Arthur C Clarke in many popular hardback books of the 70s and 80s alongside popular unsolved tricksy tales of ethereal happenings.
Listen to or download Mysteries Of The Unexplained
Ancient Greeks & Circus Freaks
This album entered a new world for the IML. By opting for two themes at once we stood the chance of getting completely mixed up but oddly there turned out to be lots of consistency. We knitted the tracks together with a short story for the first time (though there was a beautiful spoken word track on Superheroes Of The Sea). This album contains some of the heaviest and some of the most sensitive moments from the group yet.
Listen to or download Ancient Greeks & Circus Freaks
Superheroes of Space
Space turned out to be a killer of a theme. Unsurprisingly the topic created a lot of reverb, electronica, large noises and tiny tiny noises. Perhaps our most sonically coherent album, Superheroes of Space was probably our biggest party record. For, specialist parties. This also formed the last album of what came to be known the Superheroes trilogy.
Listen to or download Superheroes of Space
Superheroes of the Sea
That not so difficult second album. The sea conjured up stories of monsters, explorers and less freaky members of the natural world. We welcomed in some new members for this album and had our first full band collaboration with Windy Old Weather. We also kicked off the concept of changing who was running the ship to see how that would effect the end result.
Listen to or download Superheroes Of The Sea
Superheroes of Science
Our beloved first album. We wanted to pick a theme which we figured all the musicians that we were working with would be into. At this stage, we knew personally, all the people involved with the project so knew we’d be safe with science. It turned out that the scientists that surrounded the science all had fascinating stories behind them, making it a lot easier to make emotional music about science than we’d imagined. And funny stuff as well.
