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. Opener "Doesn't Matter (If You Love Him)" sounds a bit like Tackhead if they had made house music, using a flickering and confidently repeated phrase over a lumbering drum and bass line, introducing swirling and bombing synths into the mix once the secret comes out. The strange marriage of treated voices and swelling, pitch-bent chords and effects on "Floridian Void" draws the listener into its strange atmosphere; it's an ambient house track of sorts, but the ambience here is a swirling, confusing, watery vortex rather than fuzzy, new age pap. "Privacy Settings" builds creepy wolf howls over a slow bass line and cold, far-away drums, estranged from their usual disco setting, while "Israel" picks things up again, with weird, pitch-shifting bells over dubby toms and cold chords. "Final Wave" restores the album to something resembling normality, with a disco-like swing that recalls Moodymann's beat-down productions slid through brutal dub-like effects that bring out a shade of strangeness in an otherwise happy groove.
