The Thousands

Solo Andata is the collaborative effort of Melbourne-based Kane Ikin and Sydneysider Paul Fiocco. Their music is a mess of paradoxes and contradictions. It’s tied to the digital world and contemporary means of production while feeling wholly organic.

There’s a tendency (not necessarily unique to music) for technology to become part of a work itself. It’s an impulse that was inaugurated with Claude Monet figuring he would make his brushwork visible and continues through to T-Pain figuring ‘You know what? It sounds great when I turn the dials on this autotune plugin up to eleven.’ The technology that made Ritual possible is pretty much invisible. Its arrangment of field recordings, clicks and pops (like Markus Popp gone organic), prepared piano and what sounds like a Jimi Hendrix wailing on a koto is completely absorbing.

It’s music that would be very easy to listen to once, relegate to the bin labeled ‘experimental’ and forget about, but the sheer detail of Ritual demands multiple listens. It is rhythmic without any real percussion and tells a story without any lyrics. It could be described as filmic, but that would do it a disservice. It stands alone, not needing any accompaniment.