IKITAN was born in September 2019 when Luca replied to an adv Enrico posted on a local musicians’ Facebook group, and the band started jamming one week after.
It must be noted that Luca and Frik Et have been friends for ages and have played together for over 10 years years and so they were looking for a new drummer for their new adventure.
Fun fact: the three of us played at a local gig back in 2010: Luca and Fri Et were already in the same band then, and Enrico, playing in another band, bought a demo from them (which he still proudly owns).
After almost two years together, we’ve released an EP titled “Twenty-Twenty”, a live video aka our first gig “Twenty-Twenty Live at Forte Geremia”, and we’re working on a lot of new exciting stuff.
What style of music do you play in your own words?
We describe ourselves as a heavy post-rock band with a pinch of stoner and progressive. We don’t have a singer, and IKITAN is really the result of our influences as they emerge during our jam sessions when we meet. An unplanned approach to music, where spontaneity has a huge role.
Why did you choose your name IKITAN for your band and what does it have any meaning to you all?
IKITAN was chosen by Luca, who was fascinated by its meaning, found on the Italian Wikipedia page of the “Aztec gods”. According to whoever wrote that page, IKITAN is the god of the sound of the stones. It fits perfectly the idea he and Frik Et had in mind for our music, and the moment we got together and started playing it made so much sense.
There’s also a nice little pun there: stones and stoner, of course, as we love stoner rock. And also stoned, although we don’t smoke! :D
So we’ve been playing for months with this whole IKITAN concept in mind, we prepared the album cover (thanks Luca Marcenaro!) and everything… Some days before the actual release date, we found out this was not true! Or at least not verified. We even wrote to a university professor who is the go-to expert in pre-Colombian cultures, only to find out that IKITAN is nowhere to be found! The power of unverified Wikipedia sources…
But who cares: we love the concept, it’s an inspiration for us, and we’ll stick to it!
You released your debut EP - Twenty Twenty - last year. So looking back, were you happy with the responses the EP received from both fans and critics?
When we released “Twenty-Twenty”, on 20th November 2020, we didn’t expect that it would have been supported by the people in such a positive way.
The response has been overwhelmingly good both from fans and critics from a lot of different countries, something we truly didn’t expect, and so we want to thank everyone who gave us a chance and has been checking us out in the last months. THANKS!
We’ve received over 50 reviews from blogs, webzines and the likes all over the world, dozens of interviews, about 1700 views of our new video, over 150 copies of the digipack sold in 15 countries. We’ve been doing all of this on our own, starting from scratch and building relationships from zero to hero… we’ve met new friends all over the world and this magic experience keeps surprising us every day!
Would you change anything about the EP? Or are you happy with the way it is?
The release and reception of “Twenty-Twenty” has been an incredible journey. All the things in the EP - from the music to artwork - are still very vivid in our minds, and we love it as much as if it was the first time.
The only thing that we would have loved to experience in a different way was the possibility to promote “Twenty-Twenty” with concerts… like all normal bands have been doing before COVID!
What influenced or inspired you when making the EP?
The EP is the result of bits and pieces that developed during our jam sessions (including some riffs from the very first time we met), and then developed into three songs, which we eventually merged together.
It’d be difficult, with hindsight, to trace back what influenced us to create each and every emotion contained. It’s fair to say that we probably have influenced each other while playing and arranging the music, trying to make all the pieces fit together in a nice and interesting way for the listener.
We’re playing the music we’d like to listen to, so we’re inspired by our favourite bands, and we can include Deftones, Tool, Yawning Man, Russian Circles and Clutch in the lot. And there’s a lot more too!
For what concerns the album artwork, the idea of Orazio, the little sausage dog, has always been with us in some way, as well as the alleged god of the sound of the stones, IKITAN. We represented this visually, thanks to the impressive cover painted by Luca Marcenaro, taking inspiration from the Simpson episode where Homer hallucinates and sees the Spirit Guide…
What is Twenty-Twenty actually about?
“Twenty-Twenty” is our debut EP, consisting of one instrumental song lasting exactly 20 minues and 20 seconds, and published on 20th November 2020. Too many 20s not to have a meaning, right?
Well, the meaning of “Twenty-Twenty” is… whatever meaning you’ll want to read in it.
Some folks who wrote a review detailed how each part of the long song corresponded to a phase of the pandemic arriving in Europe. That’s a view of the song we didn’t think about, but as long as people can find new meaning in our music, that’s fine with us.
We don’t have a specific message nor does “Twenty-Twenty” have any specific meaning.
Things have been clicking quite randomly one after the other:
By the end of Spring of 2020 we had enough material to put together three different songs and, considering the overall situation caused by COVID, we said: “it’s our chance to put the word ‘end’ to this first part of the story of the band, nobody knows what’s gonna happen next, so we want to set this moment in stone” or, well… on a CD.
These three songs were somehow linked among them and at one point we also started thinking about just releasing the album as one only song and debut with a one-track EP. It was all very random and things clicked one after the other quite surprisingly, including the whole “number 20” thing.
You then followed this up with a Live EP and Video Performance. Where did the idea come from to put on a Live Performance of?
It all started very low-profile: after releasing “Twenty-Twenty”, and being still unable to play live, we thought: let’s do something and show the band is active. So the initial plan was to do a live on Facebook or Instagram from our studio and just play chunks of the whole song. Just for the sake of doing something, really, getting ready for a concert, and showing another side of the band’s life. And most importantly - show the band playing live.
Then as it always happens one thing leads to the other, one of us has a crazy idea and the other two add fuel to the fire… It was the end of January when we started envisioning this project… So the first major change was that we decided to play the whole thing, and not just parts of it anymore, in an outdoor setting, and make it our first live concert.
We’re fans of the whole desert rock scene, so generator parties and the likes have had an impact, even visually, on us. The idea was, on one hand, to tribute that concept, and on the other hand, to play the whole song, as we never did before, showing the band in an amazing setting in the wild. Also, we saw the video Yawning Man did (Live at the Giant Rock) and it was an inspiration too, of course.
On top of that, Genoa, our city, is perfectly placed between sea and mountains. The city itself is kind of between two of the major mountain chains in Italy (Alps and Apennines), so when you talk about nature and the wild… it’s the mountain that you’re thinking about. And so we did: the video was shot on top of an old fort and we’re extremely pleased with the end result.
Forte Geremia is officially the first live concert of IKITAN, a live concert which speaks of its times: there’s no audience and it’s only available on the Internet.
