Biography It was spring in 2001 and in the middle of Europe . Where I can't remember, probably Hamburg, Naples or Manchester or somewhere like that. Liam and Joe met Claudia and Connie and the four of them decided to make a record as quickly as they could. All the best records they liked were made quickly. They wanted it to be a punk electro reggae country mess, the sound of people with butterfly minds, getting bored quickly, getting excited quickly and all with a terrible urgency. Convening for a week in Munich and a week in London they made an album about the weather, holidays, boyfriends and girlfriends, sailors, the service industry, unrequited love, tom waits, sport, being afraid of going out, murder, record collections and small boats. Then the four of them went their separate ways, only to meet every now and then. The album would be called 'Ice Skating' and would be proceeded by a beautiful double 7" pack, because nobody seemed to make lovely packaging any more. And the band? The band would be called ultrafox... Website: ultrafox.de Review Musikexpress Germany October 2004 Debut from a German Electro-Pop-Duo, as yet only released in England . Maybe I could have combined this review with the one of the new Client record. It is not so far away. Sneaker Pimp Joe Wilson fiddles about on both records. They know and visit gigs of each other. Two girls creating Electro-pop where everyone shrieks “eighties”. And when you ask how some would define the eighties: Shrugs all round, because with all the play of the aesthetic in the eighties neither nor would have been possible. Except the bandname Ultrafox probably, that would have been possible. A band in the eighties could have been called something like this, which might have proceeded sometime from Punk and Electro-pop and then got stuck with traditional folk in the end. With ICE SKATING, Claudia and Connie Holzer together with the Sneaker Pimps Liam Howe and Joe Wilson want to show that what Kraftwerk a few million years ago began, still has it's place in decent electronic music: melodic ‘fridge aesthetic' from people who in real life are far away from being as ice cold as their stage characters want to convince you. On this album are hiding between wobbling Sequencer sounds, sizzling computer-drums and vocoder voices a lot of damn pretty, heartwarming, bitter-sweet Songs (to be precise: eleven, because “Horses” is an alright but to be overheard nonsense- in my opinion). The most beautiful of all of them is the folk inflected “Little Ships” which reminds you why you listen to popmusic: because you are driven by an undefined desire which should please never stop, because you want to continue floating in the search of something that you don't really want to find.