Bleep

Ital Tek's seventh album Timeproof confronts the temporal void of the studio, the collective blurring of our senses, and breaks away from it altogether. Outland was suitably dark and restless when it dropped in early 2020. Even then, there was no predicting how the next three years would play out. For Ital Tek, that time has only amplified the curious and surreal space he explores in his music, musing on observations of his creative practice where time becomes immeasurable and perception undefinable.

‘Phantom Pain’ tiptoes in over bursting noise. It growls louder and more sinister, threatening to overpower until the familiar ruckus of marching, warlike drums and forcefully lasering synths displaces the dread into a stealth mission-like groove. Sounds like this exist in the album’s half-lucid world, lured into the form of a dance beat yet magnetised always towards formlessness. It’s in these moments where Ital Tek shows off his penchant for eking emotion into expert sound design; languid in tempo yet lacerating in texture, ‘Cold Motion’ depicts the stubborn will to slowly drag yourself forward, with misty ambience shot through by sharp intakes of air.

Cinematic tension hangs in the commanding bass hits and spiralling helicopter blades of ‘The Mirror’, while irregular kicks on ‘One Eye Open’ play with the listener’s expectations, as per the themes of “the distorted perception of time”. Concrete slabs of percussion boom on ‘Heart String’, a brutalist maze of incinerated walls of synths where an arrhythmic heartbeat pulses, flayed in ‘The Next Time You Die’ as rays of light fly out in the track’s vast, grand atmosphere.

Ital Tek turns further inward on Timeproof, laying bare his creative headspace for a breathtaking album that drifts between evocative warmth and gritty distortion.