Bleep

Ital’s Daniel Martin-McCormick may already be familiar to you from his work as one half of the spiky disco-punk band, Mi Ami, together with Magic Touch, or as the psychedelic, shouty Sex Worker on Not Not Fun. However, recently he seems to have found his true calling, emerging as his ‘house-not-house’ mutation, Ital.

After a string of exceptional 12”s on Amanda Brown’s 100% Silk dance mecca, Ital presents his debut album with Planet Mu. His version of house music arrives in its most loose, ‘outsider’ form. The basic blueprints of functional dance music represented with 4x4 rhythms, yet smudged to near indistinction - a front to more exploratory, subversive sounds; linking dub through to industrial structures and other peculiar, minimal electronic oddities. McCormick forsakes the ardent melodies of more traditional house music for a more skewed, unsettling sonic trip. Frenzied FX and stuttering vocal loops lend much of his music a sense of deep-set bodily dissonance, yet all the while a groove snakes its way through its heart ensuring that it remains rhythmic and danceable.

It seems as if Ital has found the perfect balance in creating something that sounds undeniably contemporary yet schooled from the days when house music had spirit and wild incarnation, when its auteurs disseminated messages to their community. It’s a middle-finger up to the house-music-by-numbers heard all too much these days and a signal in the mist from a true creative mind.