In the Nursery (often ITN) are one of the Bureau's long-running English neoclassical / martial-industrial entries. Formed 1981 in Sheffield by twin brothers Klive and Nigel Humberstone (born 1961, brought up in a small village west of London and later relocated to Sheffield for separate college campuses), the duo has worked across 45 years and 30+ studio albums. The catalogue's structurally distinguishing feature is the soundtrack-and-score sensibility: even outside commissioned film projects, the music is written and structured to film-score conventions, with the electronics, classical arrangements, orchestral percussion and atmospheric soundscapes operating as evocative material for hypothetical or actual moving images. The Bureau files ITN at Tier I for the depth and continuity of the catalogue, the twin-brother line-up across 45 unbroken years, the Optical Music Series silent-film-scoring programme (since 1996), and the mainstream-cinema licensing across Interview with the Vampire, The Aviator, Gran Torino, The Rainmaker, Beowulf and Game of Thrones.
The 1981 founding configuration was a trio of Klive, Nigel and guitarist Anthony Bennett (also known as Ant Bennett), the third member who operated alongside the twins across the opening-period catalogue from the 1983 début through to 1985. The period influence was Joy Division, alongside the rougher experimental electronic working vein of the early-1980s UK industrial-music scene. The opening release programme through Paragon Records (the 6-track When Cherished Dreams Come True in June 1983; the Witness (To a Scream) single) and New European Recordings (the Sonority EP) aligned the catalogue with the era's UK industrial underground, the same broad audience-and-distribution that later fed into the early Sweatbox and Wax Trax! catalogues across the post-1985 release.
The 1985 move to Sweatbox records opened the catalogue's neoclassical / martial-industrial consolidation period. The opening Sweatbox release was the Temper EP (1985), fiercer than the earlier Paragon material; later Twins (1986), Stormhorse (1987), Trinity EP (1987), the Compulsion single (1987) and Köda (1988) consolidated the working idiom that has characterised the catalogue ever since: heavy orchestral percussion, classical-arrangement instrumental backbones, dark choral and martial-trumpet samples, and a method borrowed from soundtrack composition rather than from rock band conventions. The end of Bennett's guitar position in 1985 brought the catalogue to the duo-plus-rotating-collaborators configuration that has later characterised the post-1985 position. The Sweatbox period later ended with the label's collapse; the related 1989 Wax Trax! US compilation Counterpoint brought the early catalogue to the post-1988 American industrial-cluster audience and remains the catalogue's late-1980s US-distribution entry.
Following the Sweatbox collapse the duo moved to Third Mind Records for L'Esprit (1990), the catalogue's most significant working-manner shift. The record was a good deal more graceful and refined than the Sweatbox material, and was the album across which Dolores Marguerite C's vocals took a prominent role for the first time; her later long-running vocal contribution across the catalogue runs from L'Esprit through to the recent 1961 (2017) and HUMBERSTONE (2022) records. The album was recorded with engineer Steve Harris (who had previously contributed to Köda in 1988); Harris later became the catalogue's long-serving engineer-collaborator across all the duo's later records. Later Sense (1991) and Duality (1992) were the catalogue's most film-soundtrack-like albums to that point; the position anticipated the later shift toward actual commissioned soundtrack work that began with An Ambush of Ghosts (1993).
An Ambush of Ghosts (1993) was the duo's first commissioned soundtrack work, for the psychological-drama film of the same title. The album's track White Robe was later licensed by Warner Bros for Interview with the Vampire and in 2011 used in a trailer for Game of Thrones; it remains the most circulated ITN track across the placement record. Anatomy of a Poet (1994) was the mid-1990s concept album, a meditation on the creative psyche featuring English author and philosopher Colin Wilson reciting Romantic poetry against a lush backdrop of strings; the album also included a cover version of Scott Walker's Seventh Seal. The Colin Wilson connection brought the catalogue into direct cross-pollination with the post-1956 English literary-philosophical Outsider seam, and remains one of the more significant literary-cultural collaborations in this archive's neoclassical cluster.
The 1995 retrospective Scatter was the first release on the duo's own ITN Corporation label, the catalogue's post-1995 curatorial and distribution infrastructure. From 1995 onward the corp catalogue-number system has been the standard for ITN releases (the recent 40th anniversary HUMBERSTONE being corp041); the move to self-distribution coincided with the opening of the catalogue's most sustained late-career programme: the Optical Music Series. Since 1996 ITN has developed a parallel programme of new scores for classic silent films, beginning with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) was the opening 1996 entry and later expanding across Asphalt (1929), Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Hindle Wakes (1927), A Page of Madness (1926), Electric Edwardians (a programme of Mitchell & Kenyon archive films from 1900–1906), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel's interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe) and The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928).
Live performances of the scores have been at festivals worldwide including Leeds International Film Festival, Sheffield International Documentary Festival, Festival Internacional Cervantino in Mexico, Braunschweig International Film Festival, Freiburg Film Forum, Barbican London, ICA London, Melbourne International Film Festival, New Zealand International Film Festival, Perth Revelations Film Festival, New Forms Festival in Vancouver, Istanbul International Film Festival, Commonwealth Film Festival, DokuFest in Kosovo, Sensoria Festival in Sheffield, and Wave-Gotik-Treffen in Leipzig. The Bureau notes the Optical Music Series as the late-period position to which the catalogue's entire pre-1996 development pointed: a soundtrack-and-score sensibility from the opening period, sustained across the Sweatbox and Third Mind catalogues, that finally found its full-form expression in commissioned silent-film-rescoring from the mid-1990s onward.
The 2000s and 2010s catalogue maintained a focus on thematic, cinematic albums. Lingua (1998) was the ambitious language concept album with vocal contributions from around the world; Groundloop (2000) was the more rhythm-emphasised mid-period record; Engel (2001), Cause + Effect (2002), Praxis (2003), Bach Interpretations (2004), Era (2007) was the mid-2000s catalogue. Blind Sound (29 April 2011) was a more consistently dark album featuring more real percussion than previous releases and marked the catalogue's early-2010s reactivation of the heavier working palette; The Calling (2012) with author Simon Beckett the later literary collaboration. Parallel to the studio work the duo also maintained the Les Jumeaux dance-oriented side alias, including their pre-production involvement on Sabres of Paradise's 1993 techno anthem Smokebelch; the Les Jumeaux catalogue brought the Humberstone method into direct contact with the post-1990 UK rave and techno cluster.
The duo has operated in the same Sheffield electronic-music scene that produced Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA and the 1980s-onward Sheffield post-industrial release; the most direct collaborative event was the 16 May 2014 multimedia performance at Western Works in Sheffield, where the Humberstones, Clock DVA and former Cabaret Voltaire vocalist Stephen Mallinder collaborated under the project name IBBERSON, blending post-industrial electronics with live visuals.
1961 (3 November 2017) was a concept album themed on the twins' birth year (a rare strobogrammatic number; the next will be 6009); the album's tracks include Torschlusspanik musically depicting the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall, Prisoner of Conscience, Pacify and Until Before After with Dolores Marguerite C vocals; the recording featured the Up North Session Orchestra string section (Natalie Purton and Susannah Simmons violins, Matt Glossop viola, Liz Hanks cello) and was recorded at Beehive Works in Sheffield. HUMBERSTONE (2022, corp041) the duo's 40th anniversary studio album with recent tracks Cookham Stone (The Painter) referencing the brothers' childhood in Cookham Berkshire and the Tarry Stone ancient boundary marker, Émigré (The Dressmaker) depicting the historical drowning at sea of hundreds of emigrants off the Cape of Good Hope, and Ektachrome (The Animator) a part-homage to Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass.