Meet IceMorph, the dance duo creating a vibrant online community

Though the perceived aim of social media is in the name – socialising – the domination of algorithms and individual-first mindsets that it’s fostered means that, in reality, we’re talking to each other online less and less. While web forums around music used to be a key place to build communities and find new likeminded friends, the internet can now more often feel like a lonely place than a welcoming one.

CloudCore, the online music community set up by London-based producers and DJs Benomorph and Ice Wing, aims to redress that balance and get people chatting again. Through weekly drops of forward-thinking new dance music and a trading card-like system where members interact to build up their collections (songs disappear after one week) they have built a space where music discovery and socialising go hand in hand.

The community is also directly responsible for the formation of IceMorph, the pair’s new project together. New mixtape Prototypes, released this month via Partisan Records, serves as a primer for their sound as well as the types of sharp and dynamic dance music that CloudCore is becoming known for.

As the community relaunches and Prototypes is released to the world, Rolling Stone UK talks to the duo about the ethos of their platform, the debut mixtape, and what they want to bring back to the online conversation.

Read our interview with IceMorph and listen to their music via our Play Next playlist on Spotify below.

Can you tell us a bit about the ethos of CloudCore?

Ice Wing: We built the community to try and encourage people to communicate with each other, say hi, do an icebreaker of sorts. There’s multiple ways that you can you can do that. Obviously you can ask people what their favourite type of cheese is, I guess, or you can have some sort of shared experiences that you’re both going off, and you can trade a song. It’s a really nice way of trying to get a bit more from that process of music [discovery]. Maybe you make a friend from trying to find the track that you want to get, or end up discovering something entirely separate to that. It’s nice when the process of trying to get that that one thing has some really nice, unexpected human interaction.

It feels a bit like trading cards at school, where fans can make friends while trying to build out their collection..

Benomorph: On the new version of the server we just added the Corey Dex, which is tied to your username. It has a database of the catalogue, and you can fill it in yourself. You can fill in which tracks you have, and if you’ve got a track that someone else doesn’t have, you can spend our Discord currency, which isn’t real money, and send a track to someone in the server that you’re friends with that is lacking that [song].

What excited you about this way of releasing music and building a community around it?

Ice Wing: The weekly releases started off initially as a way to just make it exciting to get music again.

Benomorph: We’re really into the value of digital music. When we were a bit younger, and one song on your MP3 player was a 20th of the entire capacity of the audio player, things felt a bit more valuable. Now that you’re just clicking stream on Spotify, that value of digital music’s been a bit eroded. We just do silly, silly things that make us more excited about digital music, and one of those things is these pseudo-limited digital audio files.

Ice Wing: As electronic music fans, there’s no such thing as ‘rare’ digital music, because you can pirate whatever you want and always have been able to. Not enough labels acknowledge that, and it’s a fun wink towards the pirating communities, and things we value about electronic music that you can’t get from other delivery mechanisms.

Benomorph: One of the nice side things that we then ended up discovering about the release structure was that it ended up bringing the community together. Lots of people would see the tracks for £999 on the internet and then be like, ‘Why? What’s going on? That’s not how much music costs…’

Ah yes, the price – songs are available for one week at 99p, and then go up to £999. Have you actually had people pay that amount of money?

Benormorph: Yeah, and then some panicked refund requests!

Ice Wing: Every time that happens, we instantly email them saying to get a refund. The reason we put them at £999 was because, at the time, Bandcamp wouldn’t let you just do a stream-only for a track. £999 was literally the biggest number that we could put in to try and encourage people not to buy the song, but that didn’t always work. It was never intended to be anything other than an indication of the [songs] that are no longer for sale.

So if you want a song for your collection that is no longer for sale, you have to say hi to a fellow member and make a new friend?

Ice Wing: We’ve had so many people come with this question [about the £999 songs], and ended up sticking around and really getting stuck in. These are now people who we’ve known for years and become friends with because it all started off with this question of, you know, ‘Why?’

Alongside the development of CloudCore, you’re also releasing new IceMorph mixtape Prototypes via Partisan – tell us a little bit about how it came together…

Benomorph: We had both been making music when CloudCore was started – a Benomorph track was the first CloudCore release, and the first Ice Wing release was maybe week five of CloudCore. We’d been making music away from each other, independently, and as CloudCore started growing and getting its own sound, we started leaning into those sounds more and more strongly. After a few months of making music away from each other, we started making it with each other in mind as we became friends. I think it was in the smoking area of [south London club] Venue MOT, where we were just chatting each other’s ears off and decided to explicitly make some music together.

IceWing: The mixtape is, in some ways, the process of us getting to know each other from a musical perspective, and I think you can definitely hear that as you listen through it.

What ties the songs on the mixtape together for you?

Ice Wing: The thing which feels very special about Prototypes is that the theme is of discovery. With the stuff that we’re writing now, it’s a different type of consideration because we kind of have more of a flow with where we are, what we’re going towards, what we’re focusing on next. It’s rough around the edges, and that’s exactly what feels most right for it.

Benormorph: There’s a real sense of immaturity to it, and the tracks feel a lot cheekier than the stuff we’re making at the minute.

Do you see IceMorph existing alongside more new music from your respective solo projects moving forwards, or is this your sole focus?

Ice Wing: As the amount of time available to us is less, you really refocus your energy onto the things which are speaking loud. From the moment we made the first [IceMorph] song, I could literally pinpoint the exact second when we were making that song where I my brain clicked in and was like, ‘Oh my god, fully committed’.