About ICR

Integrated Circuit Records & Integrated Circuit Studio… the name seemed like a good idea over 25 years ago but it was soon realised it was too much of a mouthful & we were left with ICR & IC Studio. Much better.

The first release, ICR 001, was a record, the compilation LP ‘We couldn’t agree on a title’. Again that seemed like a good idea at the time... The next few releases were cassettes (remember them?) promoting the dubious ‘musical’ career of one Colin Potter. The studio moved from a bedroom into an outbuilding & became a modest 4-track. It was the dawn of the DIY era, anti-music, the tape underground, call it what you will. It grew, a little bit, more cassettes & the odd record were released & ICR became ICR Distribution promoting other fellow-travellers from near & far.

The studio became an 8-track, bigger & better & became known as a safe & sensible place for ‘unusual’ sound producers to go. The arrival of 2 small babies however, meant that something had to give, they’re being only 24 hours in the day. So sadly, ICR Distribution was put on ice. The studio meanwhile continued to improve, becoming 16 track, gathering many unusual sound making & processing devices & not being afraid to use them. Several years passed & the studio found itself no longer in a small village in Yorkshire but in a converted Victorian water tower in Lancashire. After a period of re-adjustment, an even better studio was fashioned. The 2 small babies had grown up, CDs & CDRs were suddenly a lot less costly to produce & ICR Distribution reared its head again. As before, it started small but grew much faster this time due to the power of the internet.

In 2024 we put out our 100th release - ICR 100 - 'We Couldn't Agree on a Total'. And there's plenty more where that came from....

And here we are today. Older but possibly not much wiser. Still persisting with doing things our way. That’s the way we like it. We hope you do too.

Colin Potter

Colin Potter started making unusual music in the early 1980s. He was part of the ‘DIY or tape underground’ which flourished at the time as an alternative to mainstream music. In 1981 he set up the ICR label and IC studio, now based in London,  which are both still thriving after over forty years. He developed a reputation for innovative mixing, sound processing and production and has worked with artists such as Current 93, Fovea Hex, Ora, Organum, Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, PNZ, Monos and many more, most notably with Steven Stapleton on numerous albums by Nurse With Wound.

In 1999 he started to perform live and since then he has been playing solo shows all over Europe and the US. He was also instrumental in persuading Nurse With Wound to return to playing live shows in 2005 and with them he has since played at many venues and festival all over the world. His performances feature live remixing of a multitrack recording along with sampling, electronic and acoustic devices with intense sound processing and propagation.

A series of reissues of his early work (on Deep Distance, Dark Entries, Joyful Noise Recordings, Sacred Summits, Polytechnic Youth, BFE & Platform 23) has led to an upsurge of interest in his music by a largely new audience.

Selected Live Performances

In the late Nineties, a desire to return to live performance has led to appearances at the Beyond Music festival in Los Angeles, 7 Hz in San Francisco, Primavera in Barcelona and Porto, Unsound in Adelaide and Krakow, Mutek festival in Montreal, Radar festival in Mexico City, Incubate in Tilburg, Donau festival in Austria, Brainwaves in Boston, All Tomorrow’s Parties at Minehead, Ether festival at London South Bank, Villette Sonique and GRM in Paris, the Liverpool Biennial, the LUFF Festival in  Lausanne, Tusk Festival in Newcastle, Termite festival in Leeds, Resonator festival in Preston, REC festival in Reggio Emilia, Settembre Musica in Turin, the AvantGarde festival in Hamburg, , Nodutgang Festival in Bodo and numerous concerts in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Perth (Australia), Moscow, Berlin, Munster, Cologne, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Stockholm, Malmo, Oslo,  Copenhagen, Warsaw, Wroclav, Kracow, Gdansk, Bratislava, Geneva, Lyon, Athens, Venice, Milan, Cagliari, Naples, Pordennone, Ghent, Leuven, Amsterdam, Prague, Brno, Vienna, Lisbon, Porto, Barcelona, Seville, Dublin, Drogheda,  Manchester, Brighton, Bristol, Nottingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh and London.

Further information on Colin Potter releases can be found here. We cannot however vouch for its accuracy.