Enter Alan Myson, known to most as Ital Tek: a Brighton-based producer who’s hovered around the fringes of the scene since his 2008 debut Cyclical. Myson’s shamelessly tuneful takes on the various passing iterations of dubstep and hip hop have at times seemed a little over-serious, or else a little too in thrall to the zeitgeist. But with the Gonga EP he steps out into his own meticulously defined space, drawing heavily on the Chicago sound.
‘Pixel Haze’ will be most familiar to Myson fans – as the name suggests, it trades in rolling banks of digital mist, lovingly sculpted into melancholic harmonies. Dancefloor fiends, though, might want to look elsewhere for their fix. ‘Cobalt’ is much tougher, teetering on the brink of mechanised junglist dystopia but with that now-familiar rhythmic twitch. And the title track takes things yet further, subjecting a percussive sample to processing until it twists and buckles into an ascending arc, weaving in and out of rat-a-tat snares – pure, distilled tension stretched out over its four minute length.
Label head Mike Paradinas rounds things off with a remix of ‘Gonga’, taking its deferred climax to newly sadistic heights. The pay-off is almost worth it though: the track’s various elements burst into a totally spine-tingling percussive onslaught a frustrating 30 seconds before it finishes. With any luck this is a teaser for something big lurking just over the horizon.