Ice Nine and Ice Nine Kills

 
  

I came across a reference to a band called Ice Nine Kills (abbreviated to INK, and formerly known as Ice Nine) that is an American heavy metal band from Boston known for its horror-inspired lyrics. Formed in 2000 by high school friends Spencer Charnas and Jeremy Schwartz, they started as ska-punk but later became a form of heavy metal.

I don't know much about their music but I do know where they got their name. Their band name is derived from the fictional substance ice-nine from the science fiction novel Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

Cat's Cradle is a satirical novel that I had taught to high school students and that I really enjoy. It was Vonnegut's fourth novel, published in 1963. It is a satire of science, technology, religion, and the nuclear arms race. It is black humor and if funny and scary.

In the novel, the co-creator of the atomic bomb and Nobel laureate physicist who creates for the military ice-nine. It is an alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature and acts as a seed crystal upon contact with ordinary liquid water, causing that liquid water to instantly transform into more ice-nine. If put into a swimming pool, all the water instantly transforms. If you touched it to your tongue, you become ice-nine.

Things don't end well for the Earth with ice-nine. Read (or listen to) the book.

Besides ice-nine being a fictional solid form of water from Vonnegut, I found via Wikipedia that it shows up in other places besides the novel and the band. 

The most interesting of those is Ice IX which is an actual form of solid water. On the technical side, it turns out there is also ice II, and ice III. In fact, ordinary water ice is known as ice Ih in the Bridgman nomenclature and there are different types of ice, from ice II to ice XVIII that have been created in the laboratory at different temperatures and pressures. Who knew? I hope none of them work like Vonnegut's version!

Ice-nine can also refer to:

• Ice Nine (game), a first-person shooter video game for Game Boy Advance
• Kerach 9 (Hebrew: Ice 9 ( קרח 9 )), an Israeli rock band
• ICE-9 (album), an instrumental album by Susumu Hirasawa
• "Ice 9", a song by Joe Satriani from Surfing with the Alien
• Лёд-9 (Liod-9) or Ice-9, an album by Smyslovye Gallyutsinatsii
• Ice Nine Publishing Company, Inc., licensor of musical compositions by the Grateful Dead
• "Ice-Nine," a Grammy-nominated musical composition by Steve Wiest, recorded by the One O'Clock Lab Band on Lab 2009
• Ice-9 is a fictional computer virus in the Person of Interest (TV series)

Iron Maiden

IRON MAIDEN is an English heavy metal band formed in 1975 by bassist and primary songwriter Steve Harris. They are considered one of the most successful heavy metal bands in history and have sold over 100 million copies of their albums worldwide. The band's discography includes 38 albums, including sixteen studio albums, twelve live albums, four EPs, and seven compilations.

Some of their best-selling albums include a string of hits:The Number of the Beast (1982), 1983's Piece of Mind, 1984's Powerslave, 1985's live release Live After Death, 1986's Somewhere in Time and 1988's Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.

Steve Harris attributes the band's name to a film adaptation of The Man in the Iron Mask novel by Alexandre Dumas, which reminded him of the medieval iron maiden. That was a medieval torture device that placed a person upright in a coffin that had a spiked door that pierced the person when the lid was closed.

The iron maiden device open

Imagine Dragons

They are not the first band to keep the origin of their name a secret, but Imagine Dragons have definitely turned their name into a game.

They hit it big in 2013-2013 with “Radioactive” and “It’s Time,” (from NIGHT VISIONS) and naturally fans wanted to know the origin of the name.

It suggests a fantasy or children's book, but the band members have continued to say that the name is an anagram. That is a word, phrase, or name formed by rearranging the letters of another, such as cinema, formed from iceman.

Fans have come up with lots of possibilities by playing Scrabble with the letters. Someone even ran “Imagine Dragons” through an anagram generator and got more than 107,000 different combinations of words. How about “Adorning Images,” “A Roaming Design” or “Radioman Egg Sin?”
 
People have guessed that it was "ragged insomnia" because the band added that to their "On Top of the World" music video.

 Someone online claims that on the track "Cha-Ching (Till We Grow Older)" on the deluxe edition of Night Visions, there is a scrambled vocal that if played backward says "There is no anagram."  That one is reminiscent of the "Paul is dead" rumor/theory/meme that ran through fans of The Beatles in 1966.

The band has not confirmed or denied any guesses like "A Gemini So Grand," "Roman’s Big Angie" or "God Is in the manger."

“I really liked ‘God Is In The Manger,’” said guitarist Wayne  Sermon. “That one put me in some contemplation. The truth of the matter is all of them are better band names than Imagine Dragons. We probably should have gone with one of those.”

There is a good possibility that the whole anagram explanation is a hoax, or that the real basis for the name is not that interesting.

Lead singer Dan Reynolds has said that “We really had a phrase that we all agreed upon, and had meaning to us, particularly as artists. We just thought it would be cool to keep something to ourselves because you’re always exposing yourself as an artist.”

 

INXS

INXS, pronounced as "in excess," started out as an Australian rock band, The Farriss Brothers in 1977 in Sydney. The main players were composer and keyboardist Andrew Farriss, drummer Jon Farriss, guitarists Tim Farriss and Kirk Pengilly, bassist Garry Gary Beers and main lyricist and vocalist Michael Hutchence.

Playing gigs with local bands like Midnight Oil, the suggestion was made to have an edgier name.

The INXS name was inspired by bands such as the English band XTC and Australian jam band IXL used a kind of acronym/abbreviation.

IXL ran ads with a man saying "I excel in all I do," and XTC stood for ecstasy.

INXS was fronted by Hutchence for about 20 years and their debut self-titled album charted in 1980.

On November 11, 2012, during their performance as support act to Matchbox Twenty at Perth Arena, Australia, INXS announced that the performance would be their last, though they did not officially announce a permanent band retirement.

Official band site www.inxs.com
INXS on Wikipedia