Greetings from Iced Ink guitarist Mike.

I’ve always loved writing music with drum machines. Upon the DR-670′s release in the early 2000′s I saw a photo of it and had an instant gear crush. What an attractive piece of machinery. I love its colors and the fonts on all of the buttons. It kind of reminded me of a Stormtrooper. I had to have it and sold my BOSS DR-550 to pay for part of it. This is what was used for drum tracks on older Iced Ink demos – it’s still used now but only as a MIDI trigger for VST drum plugins.

The title comes from the scene in the movie Mask when Rocky Dennis was making his blind love interest Diana hold various items and explain to her what they looked like. If I were able to alter that scene he would hand her this exquisite looking contraption and tell her “White box with black buttons.” And then she’d press them and totally ruin the heartfelt moment with the resulting electronic drum sounds. This is assuming for some reason it was plugged into a PA system on the horse farm or wherever it was they were at.

Without further ado, here is White Box with Black Buttons.

To quote Clark Griswold, “We’re all gonna have so much f**king fun we’ll need plastic surgeory to remove our godamn smiles. You’ll be whistling ‘Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah’ out of your a**holes!” Indeed, Clark. Indeed.

Friday January 27th is not only Iced Ink’s first gig, but it’s also Greenpoint Gallery’s Open Call Art Show & Magical Music Showcase which means TWO STAGES AND FLOORS OF FUN. Some mighty fine ear and eye candy is being dished out all night. For those of you who prefer to partake in thirst quenching at events such as this, you’re in luck. Beverages of the alcoholic and non alcoholic varieties await you. It’s cash only and quite reasonably priced, so be sure to hit up the ATM before your arrival. Visual Artists – For specific details on the Art Show, go to https://www.facebook.com/greenpointgallery

Here’s the pooper scooper:

UPSTAIRS STAGE

• 8PM    Finnegan Solo acoustic/electric fingerstyle guitarist Mike Krenner 
• 9PM    Emily Einhorn  Folky singer/songwriter
  
• 10PM  Blues in Space Genre breaking bits of hard rock, free improvisation, pop and jazz. Lush harmonies and counter melodies from the cello bring a new dynamic not heard often
• 11PM  Iced Ink Instru-mental MusicCore trio. You’re on the Iced Ink website right now, so if you haven’t heard whatever in the Hell it is that we do, go HEAR HERE
• 12PM  Chamber Band Dungeons & Dragons folk pop nerdcore Continue reading →

Fun Fact:  The band name Iced Ink came from an incredibly awesome activity/brain excising book that Ink guitarist Mike stole from his sister when he was a kid. It was called Good Times (Every Kid’s Book of Things To Do). The first time this page was read side splitting laughter ensued and twenny-something years later it became the name of the band whose website you happen to be browsing right now. It’s a fun name, especially when you see an imaginary light bulb illuminate above the head of someone who has heard the name countless times and then finally says “Oh… I get it!”

That page looked like this:

Hm… That one kind of sucks… let’s try that again.

Click for larger image

We here at Iced Ink Headquarters are proud to announce that the band is a real band again, not just some guy sitting at his computer recording with himself. WOO HOO

We’ve got Ethan Meyer on drums and Gregg Mitchell on bass, y’all! Things are sounding face meltingly good. If you live in the New York City area you are strongly encouraged to find January 28th on your 2012 calendar and write GOING TO SEE THE ICED INK COMEBACK SPECIAL AT GREENPOINT GALLERY on it in Sharpie.

Feel free to head over to the contact page and sign up on the Iced Ink mailing list if you’d like to receive updates/sporadic gig reminders. On that note, there’s this little social networking website that’s slowly gaining popularity called Facebook. We’re on it so if you happen to be as well feel free to hit us up and say hi over there: http://facebook.com/icedink

Old Fashioned Iced Ink dot net circa 2003

Yeah, it’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? Hard to believe that this website has been around for almost 10 years now. It started as icedink.net and although it still is, it is now more commonly referred to as icedink.com. Dot coms are way better than dot nets when you’re talking band websites, unless your band name contains something about fishing or catching butterflies.

Whether you got here via icedink.net or icedink.com, welcome. Take your shoes and socks off and click around. Or leave your shoes on. Just make sure there’s no dog poop on the bottom of them.