Slip Casting, a term relating to the casting of ceramics, to Solo Andata, echoes the ideas of fluid form, the reshaping of materials, strength and fragility. The duo of Kane Ikin and Paul Fiocco are no strangers to these ideas for integrating all forms of objects, musical or not, has been part of their audio lexicon for almost two decades. Samplers, tape machines, synths and guitar are not considered strange instruments by any definition, but when combined with horse shoes, glass panes, picket poles and shortwave radio the soundworld of Slip Casting takes on a mechanical urgency that favors metal and smoke over musical tone. Centered around a pulse, both present and implied, the album moves, breathes and collapses.
Solo Andata on Slip Casting:
Slip Casting came about from an intensive two week period of recording and writing in a dedicated space where we would go around recording everything that made a sound any way we could, from high fidelity scientific hydrophones to lo-fi dictaphones, canning radio bands chasing ghostly signals.
We’d explore these recordings, manipulating and cutting them up into a new library to draw from and played them through a fixed analog signal chain consisting of two tape machines, a ring modulator and a digital delay. Anything we were recording: found sounds, synth, guitar, piano, percussion would go through this chain.
Each day’s session started by building a loop, sitting with it like a meditation, chatting over coffee, getting to know it, before improvising over the top for a few hours. We would layer and build up a massive amount of material until it would hit a breaking point. The next day we would start pulling it apart, cutting, shaving, searching for the track buried in the layers. What started as a highly additive process ended in a highly subtractive one.
Slip Casting is Solo Andata’s third full length release for 12k and continues to highlight the incredibly diverse sound palette and genre-jumping sounds that the duo expertly finesses into detailed compositions teeming with grit and noise. Hearkening back to some of the intensity found on their self-titled album, it spits and churns like like a machine born at the dawn of the industrial revolution.
