Ital Tek

The Planet Mu mainstay talks soundtracking, effects pedals and creating his excellent new album

Alan Myson’s Ital Tek project has taken an abstract approach to electronic music across the course of six highly original albums for Planet Mu. Hailed by a generation of critics and fans alike, Myson has evolved his sound throughout the noughties, incorporating elements of breakstep, ambient and IDM. He has also been commissioned to produce music for ad campaigns across numerous TV/cable channels and brands including Red Bull, DKNY and Google Glass. In 2018, in partnership with BAFTAwinning studio Roll7, Myson created the original score for the sci-fi video game Laser League. Meanwhile, drenched in textured atmospheric and penetrating melodies, Myson’s seventh Ital Tek album Outland is amongst his best to date.

Take us right back to one of your earliest releases, Terminator 2, on a label called Net Lab. Big Arnie fan?

“I was 18 and I’d just moved to Brighton and started messing around with music. My mates and I thought ‘let’s pick an Arnie film, sample a load of stuff and see what we come up with’. I haven’t listened to that in years, but it’s funny how often I get people saying they like that even if I don’t think it sounds like anything I do now.”

Some might be surprised to learn you preferred guitar to synths and it was using effects pedals that led you into making electronic music…

“That was definitely my first step into instrumental electronic music. When I started making music I was playing guitar in a band and couldn’t afford any gear. Guitar pedals are reasonably inexpensive, so that was my first go at making ‘electronic’ music. I had a looper and some very cheap Korg multieffects and used to record loads of sound design loops and drones onto MiniDisc.”

You still like putting stuff through pedals?

“It’s a massive part of my workflow. For years I moved away from that to just working on a laptop and didn’t have much gear, but about five or six years ago I had a real urge to get back to playing guitar and bought loads of pedals. I run all my synths through pedals too. When you’re using VST delays and reverbs it’s very easy to work in a precise manner because they’re often locked to your project BPM or you’re thinking more in clicks. I don’t even bother tweaking the delay times; I’ll just have two running out of time with each other to give a sense of chaos to the sound design.”

A fairly cheap and fun way for people to experiment with sound design…

“There’s something magical about an acoustic sound that’s been manipulated electronically to sound like it’s a synth. There’s so many random harmonics and elements of chance and every time you pluck a string it’s different whereas every time you hit a key it’s probably going to sound the same. But I’m making it sound like I have an aversion to synths, which couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Your 2008 album Cyclical was very accomplished for a debut…

“I would have been about 19 or 20 years old when I wrote Cyclical and went into a really reclusive space. At the time my friends were constantly asking why I wasn’t coming out. It probably helped being a skint student but I was fascinated by the naivety of it all. I certainly did my 10,000 hours, but it was the sheer enjoyment of doing something you don’t really know how to do. I was really into the Brighton music scene at the time, which was heavy breakcore and early Planet Mu, like Venetian Snares. Dubstep was taking off and I never thought I was part of that scene but got adopted into it by getting booked with lots of dubstep acts.”

Having been a fan of the Planet Mu label it must have been special to get signed to it?

“It was surreal to be honest. It was quite a long time ago now and I class Mike Paradinas as a friend and mentor. I was only a kid when I started out and I’m in my 30s now, so I’ve spent a big chunk of my life working with Mike and the label. I was such a huge music fan that I had a real focus and ambition to get onto his label and it came together quite naturally. I didn’t even send a demo – they discovered me on MySpace back when that was a major force in music.”

You’ve found a role making music for advertising, TV and gaming. Did you have to wait for Ital Tek to take off before working in that field?

“I’ve always been a huge fan of film music but never really gave that much thought in terms of it being something I could do. Those worlds have converged a lot more recently. My music gets used quite a lot, maybe because music supervisors have liked an album so tracks get used on film trailers and adverts. I got approached to do a video game a few years ago and I’m working on a TV series at the moment that will be out later this year. I’ve worked hard at it but it’s come about organically as I’ve progressed throughout my career. I’ve only just got going really.”

You’ve also done branding for some top companies. How did you get involved in those?

“Some of those came through contacts, for example, people I know who work in those industries or friends who’ve ended up getting a job as a producer and remember me from university. The other side is that you can pitch on projects, but my record label and publishers also get approached and asked if their artists can demo things. It can be frustrating as well because more often than not your work doesn’t get used. Companies can be quite specific about what they want, then you’ll see the ad on TV and it’ll have a Rolling Stones track over it or something [laughs]. It makes you wonder what they wanted.”

Does working in one area of the industry inform the other?

“I’m a big believer that nothing ever gets wasted in music or art. If something I wrote for TV didn’t get used I’d just turn it into something else for another project. Over the past few years the amount of music I’ve churned out is ridiculous. For my latest album I wrote about 300 tracks. They’re not 300 album-quality finished pieces of music, but I get ideas down every single day, so working on lots of different projects does hone my ability to work quickly because I don’t have time to spend six months working on one track.”

More recently you worked on the sports video game Laser League. Tell us about that…

“I got that job because the company who made the game had licensed some of my music on a previous game. I ended up playing it, thought it was cool and tweeted them to say thanks for using my music and they got in touch for a coffee and told me they’re working on another game they’d like me to make the music for. There was a dedicated sound designer on that project, but for video games you have to readjust how you view music because it’s completely non-linear. It’s not a five-minute track that gets played from start to finish; it’s stemmed parts of a track that can be interwoven to suit different moods within the game. You have to be conscious of the fact that what you’re writing has to work with something else all of the time. It’s a bit like a DJ mix, except the music you write has to mix into any one of 20 tracks.”

Are certain plugins well-suited for that world?

“Although I do a lot of that work out of the box, I do use a lot of plugins for distortion, drive and saturation. I really like u-he for sound manipulation and synths, I use iZotope and FabFilter for mixing and Soundtoys plugins have the most incredible sound quality; I was using Decapitator for years. I also use Native Instruments’ Reaktor quite a lot. When I was in Brighton, I used to be really good friends with Tim Exile and he’s Mr Reaktor – a real genius at it!”

Outland feels like your biggest change to date. The music sounds more soundtrack-based with each track interlinked…

“I find it quite hard to view the progression through my music because I can see everything I wrote that didn’t make it onto the record, but the album’s definitely been informed by the fact that I’ve been spending a lot more time in the studio and less time touring. I used to view what I was doing in a live context, writing tracks that I thought I would play out live; now I feel freer and more focused on sound rather than structure and BPM, which is maybe why the album sounds as you suggest.”

We read that you spent a lot of time making notes on how you wanted to shape the album. Is that something you’d typically do?

“For the last few years I’ve been doing that a lot, whether using my phone or just on paper. It’s just gibberish like sound design ideas, or I might be watching a film and get an idea because something weird is going on in the soundtrack. It’s always good to have a strategy that beats writer’s block, which is why writing notes is a good idea because you’ve always got a bank of things to come back to. You can’t always trust your memory, so if I’m feeling a bit lost for a track I’ll look through my garbled notes and try something I wrote down six months ago. Otherwise, I’ll just focus more on making sounds with no consideration for it being a piece of music. The other day I was banging pots and pans in my studio creating a load of percussive noises. Even if I get one little cool-sounding hit from that it might inspire me to something two years later.”

Do you use a modular setup for sound creation?

“That’s a whole world I haven’t got into. I’ve got friends who use Eurorack and it does intrigue me, but we’ll see. I’ve a real fascination for guitar pedals and they’re very modular so it’s not too dissimilar in that you’re finding one unit that does something very well and creating your own signal path. I can see modular being an incredibly inspiring way to work, but at the same time I’m a big fan of trying to make something from limited resources.”

“For my latest album I wrote about 300 tracks… I get ideas down every day”

You recently mentioned going through a period of change with a newborn baby. How did that affect your day to day working process?

“For five or six years I had a studio that I rented and worked in, but since having the baby I’ve set up a studio in the loft of my house. I was pretty good at doing office hours, but with a baby you need to fit stuff in when you can so I’d often sit there listening to demos and making notes at 4am whilst dealing with that. Sometimes I can’t even remember the stuff I’ve written – I wrote two tracks yesterday and when I listened back to them today I literally couldn’t remember doing them at all.”

Apparently, you were experiencing ‘audio hallucinations’ making the record?

“It’s quite an interesting thing that happens when you’re extremely tired. My perception of speed in music would go completely out the window. I’d listen to tracks I’d been working on and the pitch and speed began to sound really fast and fluid and totally different from day to night. I thought I’d try to imitate those feelings and recreate them in the tracks. I’m not sure if anyone will pick up on that but it’s certainly something I was mindful of. I’m a fan of extreme contrasts in my music, whether it’s tempo, distortion or quiet moments.”

Would you advocate taking a break from a track and then returning to reassess it?

“I’m a huge proponent of fresh ears being really important when listening back to music – more so with the technical side such as mixing and mastering where you really need to at least sleep on it. I’ll never work on a piece of music and send it off to the label the same day because I know I’ll come back the next morning and hear everything that’s wrong with it. It might be something as simple as realising your snare is way too loud; you can become deaf to that if you don’t take a break. There’s also the problem of going past the point where whatever you’re making starts to get worse and you’re getting diminishing returns. Ten years ago I used to overwrite sessions, now I save different versions of every track I make, and that’s where a label head comes in handy, someone you trust who can hear it differently to you. That’s when you need to let go of your ego a bit because you might be making something ‘sound’ better technically yet killing the vibe or emotion.”

With your last album Bodied you turned organic instruments into electronic ones. Did you undertake a similar process this time?

“Outland is much more electronic instrumentbased than the previous record with a little live recording of percussion and guitar. On Bodied I did a lot of sampling and recording, including sessions with a vocalist where we recorded loads of abstract vocals that we manipulated into pads and instruments. We did the same with cello and violin; I can’t play them but I can get a note out of them.”

What’s your typical motivation for using a hardware synth over a softsynth?

“With hardware, I really like the fact that I’m not

striving for perfection all the time. If I’m working with softsynths, which I do a lot, I’m always looking to tweak things to make it better or looking at what some function does, whereas with the hardware synths I’ll tend to get a vibe going more and know that I need to work quickly and get something down because if I nudge a setting it’s gone forever. I guess I find hardware more inspiring in the writing process and software much more effective for sound manipulation and the technical side of things.”

When making Bodied you apparently recorded sounds quietly and cranked up the volume to give you some ambient noise?

“It probably came about because I had some noise complaints, so I went from being really loud in the studio to being a bit more conscientious and keeping the sound down a bit [laughs]. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the noise floor when you’re using pedals or recording with a microphone. The studio wasn’t a particularly well treated space, so it’s nice to have that life in the sound. A lot of what I do is aimlessly experimenting, finding something that works and running with it.”

Working in the box can be quite a noiseless environment, so it sounds a good way to get some ambience into a track in a natural way

“Even if you’re working in the box there’s nothing wrong with adding noise. I’ve recorded ‘nothing’ through a signal chain just to get a bit of hum, so often effects units will kick out a bit of distortion or flange. It’s imperceptibly quiet, but if you crank the volume right up and sit it in the mix it does gives a track some randomness.”

You’re not much of a gear hoarder – do you tend to rely on a few choice pieces?

“Over the past few years I’ve pretty much had the same setup. I buy little bits and bobs, but my desert island synth is definitely the Korg MS-20. I really like synths that you can switch on and create a new sound with every time rather than just saving a preset because it makes you a bit less precious about how you work and value a take more. If I know I can load a preset up later, run the MIDI through it and rerecord the take I don’t value it as much. There’s tracks on the new album that are literally one live take of me playing covered in live effects so there’s no way of recreating or stemming those sounds out. If I hit a bum note or it’s slightly out of time then it just feels more real to me. My sample bank of drum shots is 80GB, so I don’t hoard gear but I certainly hoard data.”

What other synths are you relying on?

“I use the Moog Voyager a lot and I really like the Arturia MiniBrute. As mentioned, it doesn’t have any memory, which forces you to make sounds rather than rely on something you’ve made before. I’m mostly into monosynths and I’m not the world’s greatest keyboard player; I tend to layer harmonies rather than write with chord progressions. The only polysynth I have is the Prophet-8, which I tend to sample from rather than play as an instrument.”

Is it important for your setup to enable you easy access to everything?

“I have gear that’s out of reach but it tends to be stuff I don’t use. A really important thing in your studio is to have everything on and within arm’s reach. Any barrier that stops you from getting an idea down, whether physical or mental, needs to be removed.”

As with your guitars, you’re feeding the MS-20 through pedals?

“I’ve got nine or ten pedals on my pedalboard and everything in the studio can be run through it. There’s no mixer, I just go straight into my UAD Apollo soundcard and that’s going into the Thermionic Culture Vulture, which I use quite a bit. It’s taken me a while to get everything wired in properly but I don’t have the patience to problem solve while making music and find that faffing around trying to find why a connection’s not working is infuriating. I can’t remember who said it, but every second an idea is outside of your head it’s getting worse until you get it down.”

Do you have a dedicated hardware chain running through to your DAW?

“Something that’s quite important for people to have is a delay pedal, because as I said earlier there’s something really nice about the impreciseness of a live delay that’s synced to your DAW. You just get sounds that you wouldn’t get otherwise. My signal chain consists of a pitchshifter and ring mod at the front and three distortion pedals. I run absolutely everything through a Moogerfooger ring mod but don’t actually use the ring mod; it’s just got a drive on it that provides such nice warmth to everything.”

You’ve used all the DAWs over the years but settled on Ableton…

“I started on Cubase, or whatever it was called before that, when I was about 14 and a lot of my first album was made with Reason. Then I got into Ableton in the late ’90s because I read Trent

Reznor saying that you have to check it out. I’ve tried to get into Logic and have used trackers such as Renoise, but it’s really important for me to work fast and I’m really fast on Ableton. Having said that, if you’re using Ableton in the composing world you’re a bit of an outlier – Cubase and Logic are probably more appropriate for working to video or film.”

You once mentioned how playing your music to someone changes your perception of it, even if they don’t say anything…

“I can’t explain what it is, but it definitely exists and it has to be a person – I don’t think it would work if you played it to your pet cat. I often play stuff to my wife, brothers or a mate and within a few bars I’ll think, hang on, this is shit actually. Making solo instrumental music can be such a solitary experience, so I guess it helps to have someone burning their eyes in the back of your head once in a while.”

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

The new Ital Tek album Outland is out now on Planet Mu. For more, visit italtek.bandcamp.com