After a two year gap, Ital Tek returns with Bodied, a sixth album Planet Mu long-player. 

Bodied, we’re told, “shows a further evolution” of the Brighton artist’s sound and also a “new direction” from his last album, 2016’s Hollowed (2016). We’re also told that it presents a new “more detailed world” that has been fleshed out and filled with the spectre of human voices. The label explains that “all the sounds are highly designed, but this time barely a whisper of dance music remains.” Bodied, instead, is built around acoustic elements and ghostly choral arrangements, refracted and transformed into atmospheric, alien forms which are given the time to settle and transform. 

Alan explains: “After completing Hollowed, I had over a year away from writing any of my own material. I was working, composing music for a video game and a number of different projects. I needed to find a way back in and I rediscovered the joy of music being a release as opposed to a job. I was getting up really early and sketching out lots of ideas very fast, squeezing in quick bursts of writing at the beginning or end of long studio day spent working on other musical projects.“

“It was important for me to define the world that the album was going to inhabit before taking it any further, so I put a much greater focus into the sound design and palette than I had before. I wanted to make the music sound very physical, geometric, and monolithic as if it inhabited a physical space.” 

“On Bodied the music focuses on the interplay between the minuscule and the vast, beauty and brutalism. With this album I was much more concerned with dynamics and the discipline of holding tension; the use of space and silence to provide a counterpoint to the intensity.“

“Most importantly, I was keen for there to be a human acoustic foundation, so I did a lot of live recording of cello, violin, harp, and guitar – anything I could get my hands on. I was certain that I wanted there to be a greater vocal presence—nothing lyrical or at the forefront but to give it an underlying organic quality—to impart some humanity into the music.“

Tracklisting

01. Adrift

02. Become Real 

03. Cipher 

04. Lithic

05. Isolation Waves

06. Vanta 

07. Across Time

08. Hymnal

09.  Blood Rain 

10. Prima

11. Fragility

12. Bodied 

13. The Circle Is Complete 

Bodied LP will land on September 7, with “Blood Rain” streaming in full below—or here for EU readers due to temporary GDPR restrictions.