CD Reviews

Ital | Hive Mind

Planet Mu

By MICHAEL C. WALSH | February 7, 2012

3.5 Stars

If there was a broken-record knock against electronic music in the last decade, it's that it all sounded the same. But there was some truth to the charge. During the mid-aughts minimal implosion, a majority of electronic music did sound the same, with the banal bleeps of Minus leading the charge towards uniformity. But today you'd have to be bullheaded to maintain this conviction. Fully realized genres cycle through a period of emergence, boom, and backlash before you can say "Deadmau-five." Most recently, the genre boundary lines have blurred to a near-dizzying degree, perhaps never more so than on this debut LP from Daniel Martin-McCormick. One could go as far as to label it genre defining, but let's not. As a member of SF-bred psych outfit Mi Ami, the producer has a pedigree in noise. And there certainly are noises here — ranging from wolf howls to chopped Whitney Houston samples. When it comes to noise, however, this disc is more accurately defined by the lack thereof. Each of the five tracks exudes an initially familiar motif — like the exultant rave synthline on "First Wave" — before being warped with an array of lops and floods, defying reminiscence at every turn. It'll inevitably be pigeonholed as post-house or something equally asinine, but for now, it exists without definition, and for that we can be grateful.

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[ 05/29 ] Brad Hooper @ Andy's Old Port Pub

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ITAL | HIVE MIND | February 07, 2012
If there was a broken-record knock against electronic music in the last decade, it's that it all sounded the same.