IKI: BODY - PRESS & QUOTES

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Reviews

Chain D.L.K. (IT/US): 4,5/5

IKI’s "Body" does not ask to be listened to so much as inhabited. It is an album that breathes, sweats, twitches, occasionally forgets what it was doing, then remembers - like a living organism caught mid-thought. Built entirely from voices, and proudly so, "Body" refuses the cosmetic surgery of heavy processing in favor of exposed skin: cracks, saliva, friction, pulse. If most contemporary vocal music tries to sound superhuman, IKI insist on sounding unmistakably human, and sometimes inconveniently so.

For more than a decade, this Nordic vocal collective has treated the voice less as a vehicle for melody and more as a full-body instrument, a nervous system with lungs attached. Here, that philosophy tightens into something almost anatomical. Tracks like “Run”, “Walk”, “Dance”, and “Float” aren’t metaphors; they’re instructions, tempos mapped directly onto muscle memory. You don’t so much hear them as feel your own body quietly syncing up, like an internal metronome realizing it’s been off all day. The recurring “Circuit” motifs act as pressure points - short, ritualistic pauses that reset the flow - circling an unsettling question that lingers longer than the notes themselves: what remains when the body stops performing its most basic task?

There’s something faintly humorous, too, in the album’s seriousness. Five highly trained vocalists working tirelessly to become “one body” is a beautiful idea, but also an absurd one, like a very disciplined choir trying to cosplay as a single mammal. And yet, it works. The friction between individual voices never fully disappears; instead, it generates energy. The group oscillates between trance-like cohesion and moments where the seams show, reminding us that unity is always negotiated, never given.

Musically, "Body" sits at an uneasy crossroads between ritual and club culture, between ancient vocal practices and the ghost of electronic music that isn’t actually there. Beats emerge without drums, drones without synths, drops without bass. It’s minimal, but not ascetic; physical, but not athletic. The album unfolds in cycles, encouraging repeat listening, as if the end were merely a suggestion. This circularity mirrors IKI’s long-standing interest in improvisation and deep listening, but here it feels more existential than exploratory - as if repetition itself were a survival mechanism.

Context matters. Coming from a group deeply embedded in experimental performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, and live ritual, "Body" feels less like a standalone record and more like a distilled essence of years spent testing what voices can endure. Their history - working with artists from Blixa Bargeld to Laurie Anderson - hovers in the background, but never overshadows the intimacy of this release. If anything, "Body" feels like a deliberate stripping away of spectacle, a move toward something quieter, riskier, and harder to market.

In the end, "Body" is not comforting music, but it is caring music. It doesn’t promise transcendence; it offers presence. It asks you to listen with your ribs, your breath, your balance. And maybe that’s the joke, gently delivered: after all the machines, concepts, and abstractions, we’re still stuck in these strange, noisy bodies - breathing, vibrating, making sounds - and IKI have decided to take that fact very seriously, without ever pretending it isn’t a little bit weird.

Musikexpress.de (DE): ★★★★

Electroacoustic vocal acrobatics at the limit, tearing down the boundaries of language.

The most beautiful music documentary of the year is called "Monk in Pieces" and deals with the work of Meredith Monk. The 82-year-old has expanded singing through unconventional techniques and freed it from the burden of semantics: her music did not need words in order to have an effect.

The Copenhagen quintet IKI stands in this tradition, which on its fifth album BODY can hardly be measured in clear bars and beats anymore. Anna Mose, Guro Tveitnes, Kamilla Kovacs, Johanna Sulkunen and Randi Pontoppidan instead create with their voices complexly interwoven sound polyphonies or let vocal fragments mutate into electronic rhythms until it is no longer quite clear what comes from a human and what has been alienated through machines, and whether that distinction even still matters today.

The ambient sounds or industrial and IDM rhythms mostly remain in the background, the focus is on the interplay and counterplay of voices that with few words are able to say a great deal.

Blow Up magazine (IT):

IKI is an all-female quintet from Finland, Norway and Denmark: Anna Mose, Guro Tveitnes, Kamilla Kovacs, Johanna Sulkonen and Randi Pontoppidan. They boast excellent collaborations (among others Blixa Bargeld, Laurie Anderson and Matthew Herbert) and have already reached their fifth album.

They are all vocalists, and for their music they use only live electronics (pedals and various devices) with which they manipulate their voices in real time, so live they must be quite a spectacle. On record they are no less excellent: ethereal a cappella, or almost a cappella, pieces (“Circuit”, “When”); dance powered by reiteration and insistence (“Dance” and “Explode”, and it would be nice to hear remixes of both); and various experimentations (“Run”, “Breathe”, “Walk”, “Float”, “Wander”), evidently inspired by the master Anderson (“Awake”, “Remember”).

In short, a very well-made record, but the group’s real strength is certainly the live performance, on which I would be ready to bet my two cents. [8.0] Stefano I. Bianchi

Seismograf (DK):

A Microphone In the Nervous System

It sounds as if someone has placed a microphone directly inside the nervous system’s electrical impulses. The Nordic electroacoustic vocal ensemble IKI explores the boundaries between body and technology on their fifth, self-produced album BODY, where the five singers’ bodies merge into one large, organic rhythm box.

The tracks change form as the body breathes, dances, awakens, runs, wanders – in the imperative mood. The harmonically unison ripple of »Float« is countered by flickering modem-like sounds in »Regenerate«. Everything is framed by the recurring theme »Circuit«, which ultimately gathers the fragments into a single linguistic statement: »Are you gone when your body is not breathing?«

BODY demands concentration. IKI claims that all sounds on the album are created with the voice – a counterpoint to the electrically manipulated, a kind of reversed version of synthesizer sounds that imitate the human voice. It’s an incomprehensible mystery one keeps listening for: how can the voice produce the accordion-like sound on »Breath«, panned all the way to the left and slowly taking over the entire soundscape? Of course, it can’t do so on its own. The recording itself is an electronic mediation. The technological tools act as a microscope for vocal expression. It’s powerful because it asks about the transitions between human and machine, between life and afterlife. Yet the premise holds a paradox that never fully resolves.

Loop Music Magazine (CL):

IKI is a vocal ensemble formed by five vocalists from Norway, Finland, and Denmark. Active since 2009, they have released nine albums in which they treat their voices as instruments. Their singing is a cappella, but it is also processed using electronic devices. The songs are composed, but improvisation also plays a role in their performance.

IKI has performed at the most important venues and festivals in Europe, such as TEDx in London and the Roskilde Festival in Denmark.

They have collaborated with renowned artists such as Blixa Bargeld, Hotel Pro Forma, Damselfrau, Henrik Vibskov, Laurie Anderson, and Matthew Herbert, among others.

This ensemble seeks to create new sounds, pushing the boundaries of the avant-garde through experimentation and physical interaction.

The quintet, made up of Norwegian Guro Tveitnes, Danish/Hungarian Kamilla Kovacs, Finnish Johanna Sulkunen, and Danish Randi Pontoppidan and Anna Mose, seeks to become a single body; physical interaction producing rhythmic pulses at certain tempos depending on the action being performed, resulting in songs such as “Walk,” “Run,” “Dance,” and “Float,” in which is clearly a physical movement that I guess also occurs while we float. What actions are available to us when we float? (Slow breathing / listening / observing / perceiving?).

IKI uses an 11-syllable cyclical melody based on a recurring acoustic motif called “Circuit,” which takes on different melodic forms, whether the song is acoustic or electronically enhanced. Some of the songs are completely acoustic, such as ‘When,’ where each time the word is pronounced, unfurls a new meaning, especially when it lingers as a question. ‘Breathe’ is moving with its heart-wrenching vocals accompanied by caressing electronic textures. ‘Float’ seems to be taken from a sacred ceremony, where the choir reaches new heights. ‘Explode’ features a series of arpeggios alternating with abstract melodies, while in ‘Remember,’ which closes the album, the vocals are altered.

With each physical movement they make, IKI seeks to understand what happens between “the interaction between the organic and the mechanical, the spontaneous and the analytical, the improvised and the composed.” From this interaction, what language emerges? / Which emotions arise?

GONZO (circus) (“Breathe” was featured on their compilation album, Mind the Gap #174):

“Run”, “Dance”, “Breathe”, “Walk”, “Remember”, a selection from the material found on IKI’s new album BODY. Using only their voices and the many ways to transform them, the five vocalists created a work inspired by the human body, in which the imperfections and rawness of the human voice are also emphasized. In these songs, everything moves in circles. BODY is a wondrous listening experience that reveals the freedom and possibilities of the body itself as an instrument. With “Breathe”, the Copenhagen quintet offers you a first dose of experimental breathing rhythms.

Inactuelles

Post-minimalist polyphonies...

“Circuit I” draws us into an irresistible swirl of voices, extended by its electronic emanation, a way of entering “Run”, which might sound purely electronic if we didn’t know that every sound is woven from the voice. Hypnotic rhythmic pulses, subtle drones and vibrations, whirlwinds of ethereal voices, a bath of voices laced with syllables melting into an impressive wall of sound. Simply magnificent, what a blow!

The brief “Circuit II” offers a breather with an atmosphere of medieval polyphony, releasing us into “Dance”, very Reich-like and at the same time a distant echo of David Hykes, with voices that verge on throat singing or guttural Buddhist chants. “Breathe”, with its incessant, chopped repetition of “Breathing”, evokes Laurie Anderson. The piece lifts off into a sumptuous hymn haunted by loops, Steve Reich from his great vocal period again. The interlude “Awake” shakes us awake from the dream that came before. “Walk”, bordering on hip-hop, feels like a rhythmic incantation, expanding into short, wonderful flights. “Float”, at first medieval in its pure polyphony, transforms into dreamy, repetitive embroideries, dotted with strange chimes. The haunting downward repetition of “When” fills the short piece of the same name, while, on a similar principle, “Wander” spins wildly into dizziness over bubbling vocal sounds before ending in sighs that turn into a kind of glitch and clicking in “Regenerate”, almost Alva Noto!

Truly, these five singers bring together on this incredible album a multitude of influences, reworking them with both wit and delight, clearly audible in the joyous “Explode” (track 12), a hiccuping kaleidoscope. It is in “Circuit III” that we finally hear the much-mentioned key phrase, before the final track “Remember”, waves of angelic and distorted voices, a meeting of the pure and the impure, if you will, leading into a sublime concert in unified heights.

An album touched by grace, at its highest when it recalls Steve Reich and others, singing the body of angels that, despite ourselves, we are.

Westzeit (DE): ★★★★★

With their impressive voices, the women of IKI conjure a beauty that is as magical as it is surreal over the electronic foundations of Body (Tila). From pulsing loops to transcendent whisper (‘Run’), to radiant female choirs over unintelligible yet beautiful vocal smears (‘Remember’), this is the finest a cappella art, sometimes with accompaniment and sometimes without (for example in the particularly lovely short ‘Circuit’ pieces).

Groove (Motherboard) (DE):

When in doubt, side with the voice. It is always fascinating to see how much is possible with the voice alone, the most archaic of all instruments. The cross-Scandinavian vocal ensemble IKI, based in Copenhagen, does not adhere to a purist doctrine; it is neither only a choir nor only an interpreter. That is already clear from the current lineup of Anna Mose, Guro Tveitnes, Kamilla Kovacs, Johanna Sulkunen and Randi Pontoppidan. They span several generations of singers, composers and producers who do not shy away from electronic processing and track or song structures, yet draw palpable inspiration from free improvisation and from the new-music avant-garde. The body-centered concept album BODY (TILA, 17 October) gets to the heart of the collective’s working method. Abstract ideas and highly individual idiosyncrasies merge into a common voice in which nothing feels abstract or aloof.

SilenceAndSound:

The vocal quintet IKI astounds us with the release of their new album Body, recorded entirely from voices and reworked electronically.

As its title suggests, the singers use the many possibilities of the voice to become one and transform into a single body that binds them all.

The atmospheres, breathtaking in their richness, lead us through every state, immersing us in a deep reconnection of body and spirit. Breath is the engine of life, and when it leaves us, what remains of us?

IKI inevitably calls to mind the work of their sisters KVEDARKVINTETTEN, with more traditional inflections, who craft a profoundly contemporary world using the simplest of instruments as their medium of expression. Vital.

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