- The artist formerly known as Ital looks to sculpure, and microhouse, for an album defined by its detailed and intricate textures.
- Daniel Martin-McCormick has always approached dance music as something of an outsider, working around a framework rather than within it. From the queasy sample collages of his early work as Ital to the narcoleptic techno of Relaxer, he's slipped in and out of genres and scenes, releasing on labels as disparate as the experimental workhorse Planet Mu and the ultra tight-knit cult imprint Workshop. His latest album finds him at the crossroads of a crossroads. For Concealer, Martin McCormick returns to Planet Mu. He's crafted an appropriately in-between album, traversing rhythms and eras in search of elusive textures and sounds, approaching dance music like sculpture.
It's striking how immediately different Concealer sounds from McCormick's past work under the Relaxer alias. Following a spoken word piece with Kahee Jong, the LP comes to life with the bright, airy synths of "Mello." A jarring vocal sample—off-key, warbling, stretched-out—brings us back to the days of "Doesn't Matter (If You Love Him)." It feels like a direct reference to his past, followed by five minutes of meandering rhythms that culminate in a tangle of heavy breakbeats. "Mello" moves at an unhurried place from point A to point B, and takes plenty of zig-zags to get there.
So many of these tracks blend dance music forms in unexpected ways—take the trap accents of "Twins," whose floor-shaking basslines are jarring, but offset by the ornate pads that could have been taken from Martin-McCormick's Workshop record. The most surprising and compelling tracks on the album chase an even more unexpected muse: old-school minimal techno. "Island Life," with its pitter-patter rhythms and whispery vocals (from Emile Weibel) reminds me of Panorama Bar-era Cassy, all tinny, miniature drum sounds reverberating in a three-dimensional soundstage. And both the tumble dryer rhythm of "Helical Phase Secreting" and the Dial-esque saunter "Narcissus By The Pool" both sound like records that could have come out in the mid-'00s. It's no wonder that Martin-McCormick would find inspiration in this era—microhouse's obsession with fiddly textures and spatial tricks mirrors his own.
That's not to say that Concealer is some kind of throwback record. In fact, its disregard for genres and their usual contexts is firmly postmodern. It's an album of dance tracks that aren't only designed for the dance floor—they're designed to be held and felt, like the almost grotesque mixed-material sculpture on the cover by Black Dice founder Bjorn Copeland. This twisted, all-over-the-place sound returns to McCormick's original position—dance music from the outside looking in. But this time around, he has the hard-earned knowledge of someone who's spent a decade on and in front of dark dance floors. These expert grooves bubble, bounce and astonish in all the right places.
Tracklist01. Let The Walls Drip feat. Kahee Jeong
02. Mello
03. Narcissus By The Pool
04. The Dusk Singers
05. Traps And Lures
06. Excision In Androgyne
07. Island Life feat. Emilie Weibel
08. Helical Phase Secreting
09. Twins
10. Concealer