Ian Daly spent more than a decade as a journalist at Details, Esquire, Wired, and the New York Times before REFRAKT, his production alias, became the actual focus — a genuinely unusual pivot from magazine writing to dance music.
He grew up in Flint, Michigan with the Detroit house scene as a backdrop and trained classically on piano, drums, and guitar, and that range shows up directly in his tracks: dark disco and melodic techno pulled through Brazilian, Persian, and Indian influences, plus Balinese gamelan, which he's actually performed.
Working out of New York now, REFRAKT layers those textures into hypnotic, modulation-heavy tracks — a former culture journalist applying the same range of reference points to production that he once applied to reporting.