• The Immersion Composition Society is an organization for songwriters and composers who think too much - an extreme musical subculture specializing in speed-songwriting games, secret listening parties, and songwriter 'lodges'. The ICS was created to provide support and assistance to "talented basket cases and unmotivated visionaries" everywhere. Various reaching attempts to describe the Society have yielded things like:
• "those guys that try to write 20 songs in one day".
• "Fight Club for musicians"
• "Tortured Genius Anonymous"   ~and~
• "an international hermetic mystery cult...with a Myspace page!"
• Site
A bewildering array of ICS music , video , and babble awaits you at our official site: ics-hub.org
• O v e r v i e w...
An especially desperate attempt to explain everything about the ICS really fast might read like this...
      Ready?
------- Game
The main thing that ICS members do is coordinate regularly to play their central speed-songwriting game, which takes place over the course of a single day.
It is called the "20-Song Game."
It works like this:
1) Everyone who is playing the game wakes up on the same day, and, while remaining split up for most of the day, all of the players individually attempt to write and record as many new songs as possible before the day is over. In theory, they are all aiming for twenty songs. In practice, absolute chaos generally ensues.
2) At the end of the day, all of the players put their session on a CD or cassette, and after pausing at a store to procure treats (very important), they all descend on a common location, where they have a lodge meeting; which is to say, a listening party where everyone listens to all of the music that everyone made, while braying in the manner of wild beasts.
------- Lodge
The ICS is a ring of songwriter lodges, which is sort of like a small, local secret society of musicians. The lodge exists as a way for all of the members to force themselves to write as much music as possible. The privacy and secrecy of a lodge are there so that while the lodge members are busy making as much music as possible, they can also feel especially free and uninhibited about it, in the manner of a person who knows that nobody is watching (except friends). The members of an ICS lodge have sworn to support and encourage each other completely. So, thats nice.
------- More games
After a couple years of existence, an interesting thing happened to the Society. Lodges all over the continent started to evolve, announcing their own regional rules and variations on the 20 Song Game, creating day-themes like the "Day Musical," and multi-player sub-games like "One Start, Two Finishes." It was becoming a common practice for Society members to personalize the 20-Song Game over time, cycling through periods with higher and lower volume goals. As if all of this wasn't enough, ICS members were also creating entirely NEW games to play on special occasions (the 20-Song Game is still the main one). These new games had names like "Spooling," "The Opus Game," and "The 7-Day Game."
So, uhhh.
------- Book
Last year, ICS methodology gave birth to a book method for blocked songwriters (Immersion Music Method).The book is called "The Frustrated Songwriters Handbook." It was written by Karl Coryat and Nicholas Dobson, and you can buy it here.
You don't have to buy the book to join the Society. At all.
------- Contact
First of all, we just created an ICS Forum, where lodgers and book readers can make friends, post stories, link to mp3s, share new games, and form virtual lodges online. Go to the ICS site for a link to the Forum.
Other than that, if you have a question, or really want to contact the founders of the Society, they can be reached here:
Nicholas Dobson ,
Supreme Tiger of Origin Lodge, Oakland, CA, USA
Michael Mellender ,
Baleful Wizard of Origin Lodge, Oakland CA, USA
