If you’ve heard Daniel Martin-McCormick’s name recently, it would have been either in association with his disco / punk / echo band Mi Ami, or as Sex Worker on the Not Not Fun label, or as Ital on NNF’s sister label 100% Silk. Raised in Washington, DC, Martin-McCormick has a history in the city’s hardcore scene—he was in Dischord Records band Black Eyes in the early 2000s—but was also making dance-inspired tracks during the same period, coming from a very different angle than the average guy with a copy of Logic Pro and a working knowledge of dance music’s history.
Martin-McCormick’s music is a stranger thing. Hive Mind, his debut full-length under the Ital moniker, uses house’s easygoing 4/4 structure as a kind of camouflage for more out-there sonic explorations, subverting expectations, seeking the links between dub’s space- and sound-bending, industrial’s unsettling sonics and the effects and black holes of minimal at its weirdest. The album has a sculptured feel: sounds twist in space while melodies pitch-shift in an unsettling way, voices fade in and out, nothing is ever allowed to settle comfortably, everything vibrates.
