Ital Tek’s ‘Mind Abandon’ Turns Away From the Screen, Back to Hands on Strings

Eight albums deep on Planet Mu, Alan Myson could coast on his reputation for darkly gorgeous beatwork. Mind Abandon does something more deliberate. Where earlier records grew out of the UK dubstep fringe and later ones got increasingly digital, this time he abandoned the laptop as the starting point. Myson went back to his first instrument, a guitar fed through effects pedals, and let the computer become just the final assembly stage.

That shift in method shows. There’s a looseness throughout the record, a sense that ideas are being discovered mid-take. “The Hidden Path” turns plucked notes from his daughter’s ukulele into a breathy ambient piece that still carries a faint rhythmic snap. “Undertow” and its submerged low end recall his earlier Planet Mu work, but the textures feel more tactile. On “Kill Switch,” gnarled percussion and foghorn drones come closer to a The Bug kind of tension, all instinct and no overthinking.

Myson calls it an introspective record, a way to break his own habits and let imperfection in. What comes out is immersive but rarely comfortable. The album doesn’t aim for the clean glow of modern electronica. It’s a producer stepping sideways to see what happened when muscle memory took the lead.