Brighton producer Alan Myson is frequently referred to as a dubstep musician, even in his own promotional materials. This made sense in 2007 when he was releasing early Ital Tek singles like "Blood Line", a track that had more of an aggressive horror-movie-soundtrack atmosphere than most dubstep of the time, but still fit the general outlines of the form. These days, though, it's an inaccurate, not to mention unimaginative, way to describe an artist who over course of an armful of releases the past five years has become impressively adept at shrugging off the constraints of genre identification.
Myson's stylistic slipperiness has reached a peak on his third full-length, Nebula Dance. He bends his sonic profile to fit enough disparate subgenres for the record to resemble a respectably broad survey of the dance music world circa 2012, or at least the parts that appeal to its more cerebral, less hedonistic citizens. You get a drum'n'bass cut here, a dip into footwork there, all with little to no indication of party-hard moombahton and trap.
It's to Myson's credit that he never comes off like a dilettante in the process. For one he seems to runderstand the source material he's working from. Not only can he grasp what makes a footwork beat read as a footwork beat, but he gets what it is about footwork beats that makes people want to listen to them in the first place. And maybe more significantly, he isn't afraid to mess with the forms he's exploring, which makes the whole project seem like a musician at play in a stylistic sandbox rather than one dissecting them with clinical detachment, a mood that's sunk more than a few artists' attempts to jump genre barriers.
For instance the titular opening cut, with its 142 BPM tempo and deep sub-bass dives, is obviously intended to be Myson's take on drum'n'bass. But the beat steers clear of obvious references to the "Amen" break that underpinned the vast majority of first wave d'n'b, replacing it with intricately plotted drum programming full of backwards samples that give it the feeling of a rhythm coiling around itself. When the song takes a breath halfway through and introduces a hint of hip-hop, it starts to sound a little like 2step and a little like the chilly dubstep Myson made his name on-- in other words a couple of nods toward drum'n'bass' descendents, which might come off as a little too clever if it didn't progress so organically.
His handling of footwork music-- whose influence is most clearly felt on "Dusk Beat", but which permeates a good chunk of the record-- is equally deft. Up until this point, most attempts by musicians from outside the original Chicago scene to emulate the style have been sunk by an overly exacting approach to reproducing the sounds of producers like DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn (both labelmates of Myson's on Planet Mu), combined with the serious hurdle of not having access to actual footwork dancers (whose highly specific demands have been the biggest influence on the form). Purists might take issue with Myson softening the style's edges and aiming it more toward the boutique headphones crowd than dancers working on their dribbles, skates, and ghosts, but the airy, R&B-tinged feel he brings to a sound that can be oppressively claustrophobic is crafty. And more importantly it simply works.
For all of the stylistic hopscotch being played, the individual songs on Nebula Dance cohere into an impressively solid whole. During his time as Ital Tek, Myson has developed a sonic identity that's proven more than capable of whatever formal experiments he uses it for. The difficulty listeners might have figuring out where to shelve it is a small price to pay for the results.
