Hive Mind

Ital is the latest alias of Daniel Martin-McCormick, a San Francisco-based deep thinker and genre iconoclast whose résumé includes punk/noise/experimental mayhem with the groups Black Eyes and Mi Ami, and weird, murky solo electronic pop excursions as Sex Worker. Ital represents, at least in theory, Martin-McCormick's take on "straightforward" electronic dance music, but there's little that's straightforward about Hive Mind (Ital's first full-length following a trio of 12"s) — and while you could probably dance to much of it, that feels fairly low down on the list of priorities here. The album's few lengthy tracks aren't far removed in their ultimate effect from the kind of spacey, psychedelic, low-impact quasi-house music that's been emanating from plenty of corners lately, but there's something decidedly unconventional — loose and intuitive, haphazard even — about the way they're constructed. Which isn't to say this is an amateurish affair — even working with deliberately crude technology (the tracks were constructed using the basic freeware program Audacity), Martin-McCormick's clearly got strong production chops, ample attention to detail, and an intrinsic understanding of how to put together a credible dance track. But he wields his eclectic musical background and border-crossing "outsider" status with smirking pride, playfully muddying up the margins of what dance music is "supposed" to do. The most striking thing here is opener "Doesn't Matter (If You Love Him)," which jabs listeners with a numbingly incessant sample of Lady Gaga speaking the title phrase (evoking the stutter-cuts of Chicago footwork music — especially considering the album's appearance on Planet Mu — but also inevitably recalling the Chemical Brothers' similarly tickish, arrhythmic use of a nearly identical phrase to similarly demented effect on "It Doesn't Matter") atop a limber, two-note punk-funky bassline punctuated by cosmic laser swoops and unexpected detours (Whitney Houston makes a memorable appearance.) It's a thrilling, if jarring and rather exhausting ride. The rest of the album, though, takes a gentler tack: colorful, certainly, but less overtly demanding of attention. Setting aside the brief, unsettling lurch of "Privacy Settings" (complete with wolf howls!), the other three tracks (each ten minutes long) are fluid, groove-oriented excursions: wet, woozy, and synth-drenched, with plenty of percussion and occasional, largely indecipherable speech samples (contributing to a vague sense of political/philosophical subtext.) There are plenty of musical reference points that might surface at various moments throughout Hive Mind — the wormy left-field electro-pop of Schneider TM, the lazy Balearic grooves of Sweden's Studio, the dubbed-out disco-house of Motorbass, the seasick swoon of Teengirl Fantasy, the brainiac irreverence of Mouse on Mars — but ultimately, Martin-McCormick has cobbled together something that can't quite be compared to anything. ~ K. Ross Hoffman, Rovi