Touching Ice are the ghost band you can't find

But thanks to vocalist/songwriter Dominic Colangelo’s gregariousness and affability, not to mention a knack for electro-industrial pop perfection, the trio are rising in the ranks at a very comfortable speed, thank you very much.

“Earlier this week, I was in a bar sitting at the counter by myself, had my headphones in, and got this nice cheeseburger,” Colangelo recalls while imbibing midday in a Brooklyn bar on Halloween. “I listened to our record for the first time in a long time, and I was, like, ‘Oh, I’m proud of this.’’

That achievement — being able to hear your professionally produced record in a bar with yer headphones on — would take most bands year upon year to achieve. It took Touching Ice about two. What might incense (aspiring) musicians who have devoted 10 times as much money and hours into breaking through is that Touching Ice didn’t even start off as a serious affair. Hell, the band’s mainstays didn’t even know they were forming a band when they started doing so.

Now, don’t misconstrue this anomalous circumstance that is occurring on this Halloween Day in the life of Colangelo, ‘cause it ain’t normal. Sure, he’s thoughtful and creeping out of his late 20s, but that doesn’t make him a modern-day Leopold Bloom, languishing on the outer rim of life and waiting for things to happen to him as opposed to vice versa. Here’s merely recharging after the band victoriously performed up and down the West Coast from late September to mid-October.

In an effort to get Brooklynites familiar with his name and that of his genre-rules-breaking electronic project even, Colangelo — who used to work for Apple Music — has spent the past week playing late-night DJ sets at various unmarked locations where the kewl kids go at night. While he currently resides in London Beach, Touching Ice — and that’s Touching Ice, not Touching ICE — decided that the extremely social, magnetic and engaging Colangelo would do. The band determined it’d behoove Touching Ice if their charismatic centrepiece preached the gospel about Touching Ice’s debut album rather than reintroduce them to his local environments.

Shaking hands, kissing babies and spinning black circles is his game plan for this evening as well. Because Colangelo doesn’t have the sharpest memory — who would, given a schedule so crammed that he probably needs an administrative assistant? — it’s fortuitous that Davis Stewart takes the baton to provide historical accuracy.

He recalls: “Davis and I met in college, at the radio station, and I knew a friend of his, and we all kept hanging out. I remember one day I was smoking weed and listening to Mile High [by the Kottonmouth Kings], and we started talking about music. I was into electronic music, he was into indie-rock.”

Just in time, Touching Ice’s third member — Abigail Reese — enters the fold in the blink of a button via video-conferencing on her cell. Patching in from Long Beach, California, She fills in the loose ends and helps us trace the roots of this rapidly residing electronic-music project.

“I’ve known Davis and Dom since I was like 19,” Touching Ice’s shy, silky-voiced singer Abigail Reese declares, as if she were taking the mic from Colangelo in a way that only close friends would tolerate.

Touching Ice’s handler of programming, synthesis and production freezes for a moment as he notices something he hadn’t before.

“Oh my God, Abby. Did you dye your hair black?” Colangelo exclaims.

This writer chimed in: “So close to the release date of your first album, you guys didn’t have a band meeting to vote on a major decision like that?”

She replies: “Yeah, no, I've been wanting to cut my hair. but I feel like I can’t, ‘cuz …”

‘Cuz the rules that used to apply to bands trying to break through in the music industry don’t have to abide by them any more, how about that? There’s a reason people fear change, and while many of us consider it to be reactionary and, even more so, cowardly, the fact that Abigail’s decision didn’t really pass them reveals the true character of the band, the values of which include diversity, progress, nonconformity and radical acceptance.

Colangelo expands extensively on the vision he had for Touching Ice once the project was established: “We had spent the last few years making music, and lots and lots of demos, but then we were on hiatus for a few months [during which we literally talked] about anything band-related. And then we got a couple tour offers, and we were like, ‘Let's just fucking crank out this record. So we hit the studio and we were doing a couple days a week, 12- or 16-hour days.

Perhaps because Colangelo knows the unforgiving cruelty of the music industry during his time at Apple, he’s also keenly aware that Touching Ice has experienced some extremely good fortune. Even so, that will not excuse them of the hard work the band will have to put in to establish themselves and survive times in their career when they’ll come close to touching the void.

“It’s been difficult, and we've hit a lot of roadblocks,” he vaguely admits, preferring to keep the personal separate from the private. “But we've figured out that it really is about the journey... sharing knowledge, figuring things out. We were on tour with White Ring, and they asked us, ‘How do you guys like to get it to sound like this? Like. so fucking crisp?’ Figuring it out was life-affirming."

He continues: “We’ve done shit where [if you ask the Internet questions], you won’t get the right answer. I've just spent so many fucking countless hours reading manuals [for] things that will answer the questions that Google can’t. So, on the one hand, I put a ton of time into that — and yet we cranked out [our full-length] in just a year. That was an eye-opener, because I felt like we worked very loosely before and this was how we realised we needed to work: to hunker down."