Touching Ice Show Recap

I’m in a dark room and everyone’s faces are constructed out of shadows. A colony of quiet conversation in the front spreads throughout the room like a rumor, creating one loud simultaneous conversation. The humidity of mass close-contact builds itself up to form thin layers of moist film on the skins of everyone here. It’s hot, we’re waiting, I am uncertain. Now our bones are vibrating in pulsating rhythms, it is one thing this experience allows us all to share.

II

Touching Ice is on stage with two strobe lights attempting to wake everyone up from their heat-driven dilapidation. There are three of them, each uniquely occupying one part of the stage. On my left there is an electric guitar screaming from guitar pick hits driving into its strings. In the middle there is a voice that carries a sense of delicacy and sings like a moist finger dragging along the rim of a wine glass. On my right, their identity is hidden by a mound of hair and a shirt proclaiming, “Jesus loves you,” worn in an ironic sort of way. In front of them is a table of knobs, guiding the group along every song. The bass rips through everything else like a giant saw cutting down into the audience. The vocals swim in and out of the conversation. The guitar strikes down in unpredictable moments to remind you that it is there.

III

In the audience, we were dancing lightly. It was the opening band, people came for Feeble Little Horse. Moments later they begin a new song. In the middle of the stage she sits low at eye level to bring our attention in like a personal conversation. She sings, “Lets get together, we’ll kill ourselves,” and for the first time it feels like the audience's energy is where it should have been since Touching Ice hit the stage. She sings about minor inconveniences and inserts contrast in finding a drastic solution through suicide. The audience is now moving more than it has been, we feel this song more than anything else from before. It felt like a mutual agreement, we had to dance not because the song sounded good but because we shared an experience relating to what the song was about.

IV

The rise of irony in everyday discourse has allowed us to dramatically align big emotions with minor things. In the song she talks about wanting to kill herself not from some internal affair that is unconfrontable, but from everyday inconveniences. An audience built of people raised on the internet has all experienced confronting an issue with simply saying, “I’m gonna kill myself,” and often not in the literal sense, but more as an proclamation of freedom, the ability to choose and direct your life as you please.

V

Touching Ice left me amused, and wanting to dive deeper into their catalog after their performance. They were a complete rebellion of expectation with the perfect blend of animosity, personality, and presence. I am not writing this article to promote the idea of suicide in any way, but more to point out the normalization of aligning drastic ideas to our everyday lives. I believe there is true value in the song ‘Let’s Kill Ourselves,’ as a means to address the normalization of feeling these emotions within our society.