From the album Ital Tek - Outland (out 1st May 2020 on Planet Mu)
smarturl.it/ItalTekOutland

Ital Tek (a.k.a. Alan Myson) returns to Planet Mu with his sixth album ‘Outland‘.

The album was written during a time of new beginnings following a move out of the city to a quieter space and the birth of his first child. During this period of seclusion Alan recorded a huge amount of source material and spent weeks and months sitting up at night with his newborn, listening back and making notes on how the new record should take form, focusing and developing ideas to shape this lean ten-track album.

Alan talks of the record being a collaboration between two parts of himself, something that definitely comes across as the album unfolds. Textures are something Alan excels at and on his last album, the largely beatless ‘Bodied’, it felt as if he was building a new sound-world. On ‘Outland’ he expands upon this. The album brings together the extremes of Alan’s sound, contrasting roughened bass and beats with starker more detailed atmospheres and emotions.

The most beat-driven song here is ‘Deadhead’, with its gnarled bouncing bass, angular distorted melodies and cavernous textures. On tracks like ‘Bladed Terrain’ the contrasts are even more defined with buzzing drones and razor sharp drums plunging into a grainy fog, giving the track a dramatic 3D feel. Then there are the stop-start pauses of ‘Leaving The Grid’, where the song evaporates into space before reemerging with shuddering rhythms and ghostly textures. Melodies crawl around these tracks as if they’re just waking up, as heard on the atmospheric ‘Angel In Ruin’.

The sleep-deprived fraying of the senses became Alan’s routine and one which he says gave him a renewed creative energy; half-asleep, working through the night, and then into the daytime super-focused but exhausted. Prone to audio hallucinations whilst writing the album, he aimed to capture these distortions in his perception of pitch and time, and you can hear these effects interpreted on tracks like ‘Endless’ and ‘Open Heart’ as melodies phase and slip out of time like an emotional Doppler effect. This is also true of the soaring atonal synths at the peak of ‘Diamond Child’, which feel like the aural equivalent of eye floaters.

These intuitive feelings and functions are a difficult thing to capture in sound, but Alan manages it beautifully and always makes the result feel warm and adventurous, heartfelt and epic.

Outland

Ital Tek - Open Heart

Not your run-of-the-mill working-class Eastern European non-binary DJ. The producer, vocalist, but also visual and digital artist strives for innovative sound design and visceral body response, despite (or maybe coupled with) raw emotion that permeates their musical output. They’re a proud member of the Ciężki Brokat crew (with whom they run the annual Warsaw Pride official afterparty), co-creator of Radio Kapitał, Polish ambassador for Keychange and SHAPE Platform 2021 resident.

Their own music has morphed several times throughout the last 15 years – from industrial or purely synthetic timbres, through polyphonic singing with Pleśni to a perplexing fusion of rhythmically and sonically jagged compositions, bass-heavy club tracks on their EPs, 'Gusła (Human Rites)' on Tańce, a limited vinyl release on London-based 51-53 Records, 'Doolska' and the latest, more experimental 'Lamenty' EP.

They presented their music during numerous festivals (Unsound, CTM, Schiev, Up To Date, Tauron Nowa Muzyka, Les Siestes Electroniques, Audioriver) and an assortment of clubs (including the legendary Berghain) in Poland and abroad (Berlin, London, Prague, Oslo, Copenhagen, Ljubljana). They remixed tracks by Kamp and Baasch, recorded mixes for Resident Advisor, DJ Mag, HӦR and CRACK, composed and created impromptu live music for interactive theatre plays: Method of National Constellations, quadraphonic sound for Jawić się, music for a Women’s Strike street theatre Manifesta and original score for Ideologix, a US-written and directed queer opera.

In the club their seventeen-year experience of supporting queer, anti-fascist and underground scenes results in an almost annoyingly disparate selection of the most forward-thinking sound offered by today’s scene. In their series of DJ-sets and club nights they blend unusual rhythmic patterns kicked up a notch with their improvised vocals.

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Ital Tek - Open Heart

Planet Mu Records