Cyclical - Ital Tek

Cyclical

Ital Tek [Planet Mu]

#01 in this month's The 20

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: The 20: ital tek planet mu

Whilst dubstep’s roots stem musically from the gritty, garage-tinted streets of southeast London, Ital Tek’s new album ‘Cyclical’ proves that the genre can be used as an explorative space for sound deconstruction and construction, just like techno can.

With 11 tracks of computerized symphonies based around the disorientating rhythms of two step and broken beat, Ital Tek uses the space between the breaks to create a dark, wholly depressing look at life.

‘Insomniac’ perhaps represents the producer’s restlessness during the creation of ‘Cyclical’, unfolding as a vacuous story that sounds apocalyptic through its distant piano lines and digitized rhythms.

‘Pins’ continues where ‘Insomniac’ left off, with Ital Tek converting the emptiness of the previous song into an uptempo, more productive glossy number, but the hope that is created soon evaporates into the shadowy ‘Red Sky’.

The echoing, haunting minor pads of ‘Still Shores’ further fuels Ital Tek’s profile as a prophet of darkness, with the environmental nod in the title suggesting ‘Cyclical’ might be a good partner to the post-apocalyptic book, ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy.

The clever use of elongated, dissipating drum hits in ‘Tokyo Freeze’ combined with the lonely samples of a machine at work brings forth a clearer vision of a future society collapsing, with the city’s technology continuing beyond mankind’s existence.

But there is some hope – ‘White Mark’ represents the LP’s only pinprick of light, with its warm melodies and female voices suggesting that beyond the void Ital Tek wills for something good to happen.

That hope though, is worryingly distant.

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