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Sep 02, 2026
Ital Tek: Chasing Accidents
Alan Myson has spent the better part of two decades building intricate structures out of dubstep's rubble, footwork's restlessness and the cinematic dread that's become Ital Tek’s signature sound. However, on his eighth album, Mind Abandon, he's stepped onto a new path by side-stepping the computer as his starting point and picking up a guitar, a microphone or whatever was close enough to hand.
What emerges isn't cleaner or simpler - if anything it’s stranger and more condensed, with rhythmic elements fighting to emerge from the album’s viscous, layered textures. Vocals are sung and then dissolved past recognition, while guitar lines and the spontaneous use of hand-played instruments buckle and erode throughout. There's even a toy ukulele buried somewhere in the mix, courtesy of Myson’s six-year-old daughter.
This is music made by someone trying to lose themselves deliberately and work by intuition rather than calculation – the result carving out its own strange geography while remaining unmistakably human, even at its darkest. Meanwhile, two decades in and Ableton still hasn't lost its place in Myson's process; it's just changed function. Formerly used for worldbuilding, its primary purpose on Mind Abandon is to capture, corrode and repurpose.
Ital Tek - “Misted”
Your new LP, Mind Abandon, marks a deliberate move away from the computer towards a more instinctual approach. What did the process of writing away from the screen look like, initially?
I wanted to get back to an instinctual way of getting ideas down without getting too fussed about details or context, but I don't want to overstate that because I’ve been using Ableton for around 20 years and it remains the brains of the operation. Still, I wanted the input to be something more instinctual, which on this record came about by singing a lot – if you can call it singing.
Let’s just say that I would take vocalisations and then create a lot of the sound design or building blocks from quickly recorded vocals, percussion or guitar. Once I’d amassed a sprawling bank of sounds, which didn't really have a huge amount of direction to them, I’d throw everything into Ableton and start pulling out some threads to put the record together.
Was that decision the result of spending too much time deliberating over sound choices or habitually returning to the same ideas?
It certainly came from trying to remove the vast number of options I had available to me. Over the years, I’ve amassed so many sounds and libraries, which probably does play into some of the commercial stuff I do, but I didn't want that bleeding into my own records. I'm always trying to think about the simplest way I can get an idea down before fleshing it out, so it's interesting to experiment with those limitations.
“It's very easy to feel like you're being busy without actually doing very much, so I try to harness being in the right mind space to be creative.”
You mentioned processing your own vocals, presumably with the intention of turning them into pads and textures. Was that a comfortable starting point, or something that you had to push through?
It’s more about coming to a realization that the human voice has so much depth, texture and character, but once you start manipulating it the original sound quickly loses its identity. Even if I’m only doing it for my own enjoyment, there is humanity to those sounds and the randomness that you get from air moving in a room compared to tweaking a synthesiser or manipulating samples from a library. When I’m capturing that, it feels like I’m using a very different part of my brain.
I’ve also discovered that if you just go with the flow and improvise something vocally, even if it’s out of tune, you're probably going to end up with something more interesting at the other end. Obviously, sometimes it sounds rubbish, but I'm a big believer that the moments spent doing that are never wasted – if you plough through and make loads of weird sounds, there will always be a little gem in there that you can use as a starting block.
Logically, it makes sense that rather than search for a specific sound, it would be quicker to express the tone vocally and just manipulate it…
It's basically a continuation of singing voice notes into your phone whenever you want to get an idea down – even if you have no intention of ever actually using that recording for anything. Basically, you’re demoing something as a vocal take, but a big part of this record was to then use Ableton’s Granulator instrument.
To be more specific, I started dragging manipulated vocal pad sounds into Granulator III to randomise and resample elements, and before you know it, you've got something pretty original-sounding. You can't even put your finger on exactly what the source of the sound is, but that process keeps me interested.
Ital Tek in his studio
Some might not realise that guitar was quite an important part of your journey before you entered into electronic music. Is that why you returned to the instrument?
I think it's about balancing naivety and nostalgia because that's how I started making sounds. Between the ages of 16 and 20, I used to be really good on guitar and would pretty much play it all day every day. Now, I'm nowhere near as good, but I can still noodle around, so I've returned to using it as an exploratory sound design tool.
It's quite nice to play instruments that you're not particularly good at because you tend to find a way into sounds differently when you don’t have exceptionally good technique. Over the last ten years, I've definitely got more into buying one-off acoustic instruments that don't hold their tune or homemade stuff that you can pick up on eBay. They’re a good starting point for exploring and setting you off on a tangent.
Do pedals play a big role in that?
Yes, especially for my Ital Tek stuff because I have the time to mess around with them. I've got a fairly big pedal board, all wired up so it can run out of Ableton and back in again - basically treated as an external audio effect. I just drag and drop it onto a channel, like you would a plugin, and then start messing around.
The joy of that, and the power of loading it onto tracks in Ableton, is that it's not exact. The delay time might be a bit random, or something won't quite land the way you expect, so if you're playing a riff, or even some percussion, and start running it through guitar pedals, you'll get something unexpected coming back in a way that you probably won't with plugins. It's good to just commit to a sound and say to yourself, “I can't change that now, so I'm just going to work with it.”
“That's probably my core workflow in Ableton – creating these hugely convoluted chains of effects within a group, applied to individual samples, whether that's Sampler or Drum Rack.”
You’ve talked about losing your sense of identity as part of the process of making this LP. How did that manifest itself?
For me, making music’s been an incredibly personal pursuit that I put all of my energy into, but when it became my job as well as my hobby, I spent all my free time thinking about it. In recent years, however, I've had children and subsequently can't spend 12 hours in a dark room doing whatever I want, so I've had to find ways to work quickly and get results that are still satisfying to me.
What I’ve discovered is that there’s no correlation between the time I spend in my studio and the quality of the output. I could spend 10 hours a day sitting at my desk banging my head against a wall and it's not necessarily any more productive than being here for two hours. It's very easy to feel like you're being busy without actually doing very much, so I try to harness being in the right mind space to be creative, which isn't to say I don't procrastinate like everyone else.
Ital Tek - “The Ice Is Thin”
The opening track, The Ice Is Thin, is almost entirely based on live guitar and keyboard. What techniques did you use to give the guitar such a textural feel?
That was probably one of the quickest tracks I've ever written and a good example of what we were talking about in relation to not spending ages finessing to come up with something you're proud of. With The Ice Is Thin, I was playing guitar in quite a naive, exploratory way - trilling between notes to get these tiny counter-harmonies going. Then I'd load that into Ableton's Sampler, find a loop that felt nice and start playing it on a keyboard.
That gave me these out-of-time Steve Reich-y loops that didn't quite loop properly - they synced up nicely at points, but started drifting at others. Ultimately, I'd get a bed of shimmering, not-quite-looping guitar pieces and then I'd start playing on top of that again until it became a kind of feedback loop. If the experiment produced a result, I'd jump on it and that would inspire me to take it in the next direction. The track only has three instruments: guitar, an MS-20 for bass and an MS-20 for the lead, so given that a lot of my Ableton sessions are literally a hundred tracks, it’s unusual that this one's only got a few on it.
You mentioned that you like picking up other instruments to experiment with, and A Hidden Path includes an appearance from your daughter's ukulele?
She’s really into anything pink, so we bought this pink ukulele from a guitar shop in Brighton. It was probably a little bit tricky for her to play, so I ended up nicking it for a bit. While you can have all these amazingly recorded sample libraries, it's quite nice to just record a few notes from a little ropey instrument into Ableton Sampler. The ukulele part is only based on three recorded notes and a couple of different velocity layers, and then I used it to layer up a melody on the track. I did play it to her, but she couldn’t quite comprehend that this pink toy is the thing that's actually on there [laughs].
From what you’ve said, people might expect A Hidden Path to be a happy track, but it’s pretty dark and gnarly. Then you have The Pull, which sounds very much like an EBM track from the mid-to-late ‘80s. As your career has progressed, you seem to have travelled more in that direction…
I'd imagine that's probably seeping in from my love of Nine Inch Nails and industrial music – they’ve been one of my favourite bands since forever. They’re actually the reason I started using Ableton in the first place, because I read in a music magazine back in 2003 that Trent Reznor was using Ableton. On The Pull, I was definitely trying to capture the sound of something scratching in your head that had a nasty energy or gnarly kind of atmosphere, but it all feels like it’s a part of the same experiment really.
On a record that's built mostly on live one-take performances, did you find yourself having to rely more on Ableton's live performance capabilities?
The thing I love most about Ableton is that it’s almost become like a transparent studio partner and extension of my brain. Because I know it inside out, I’m so quick on it – and although someone else watching me might say "Oh no, do it like this”, I have my own instinctual way of getting ideas down fast. Like I said with the guitar recordings on The Ice Is Thin, I can throw an idea at it or do something that I wasn't really intending, and Ableton will throw back something to roll with.
Will you experiment in Session View before committing to Arrangement View?
When I was making more beat-driven music I’d make tracks in Session View a lot more, but now I spend most of my time in a sort of sketchpad arrangement view. I'm not even particularly concerned with what the BPM is set to; I’ll just drag ideas in and almost treat the software like a mood board to move all these ideas around until something starts gelling. That's very much my workflow these days – treating Ableton like a big sketchpad where I can massage things into shape as they progress.
Do you use Drum Rack to map, trigger and process drum or percussion samples?
I use Drum Rack and the Impulse drum sampler, but Drum Rack's great because you can create these chains of effects on each individual sample. That's probably my core workflow in Ableton – creating these hugely convoluted chains of effects within a group, applied to individual samples, whether that's Sampler or Drum Rack.
I'm very audio-driven and don't really play around with MIDI programming much, to be honest. If I do, I'll tend to bounce it out to audio and then start messing around with it again. It goes back to what I was saying about treating Ableton like a big sketchpad or mood board – if I can get everything into audio and start manipulating it, that's where I get inspired and my brain starts to operate.
“The Pull” from Ital Tek’s Mind Abandon
Where do you think Mind Abandon sits in your back catalogue? Is it the record you set out to make, or did it become something else along the way?
I have a funny relationship with my albums in that they’re very much like pins on a board of my entire life experience of making music. A lot of the stuff that's on the record will be ideas that have been regurgitated from years ago or tiny little demos, so I very rarely treat records as self-contained; they're actually quite amorphous experiences.
But I’m really proud of Mind Abandon and think that I captured the spirit of what I was trying to do. That comes out of the sessions themselves rather than whatever I set out to make at the beginning and becomes clearer as it reaches its conclusion, but making the album’s been a very introspective, shutters-down deep dive into seeing how far I can go in my own head.
You've been on the Planet Mu label for your entire career, and I'm guessing Mike Paradinas may have something to do with that. Has he been a mentor overlooking your projects?
You've hit the nail on the head with the word mentor and it feels a bit crazy to think it's been nearly 20 years since I started working with Mike. Planet Mu’s currently based in Brighton and the music scene the label was associated with was centred on that region quite heavily, which is why I moved there. I wanted to get ingrained into that scene, so I started playing gigs and met a lot of the people who were already on Planet Mu before crossing paths with Mike. I do value our relationship because he knows exactly when to be hands off and let me disappear for two years and figure out what I want to do.
You’ve done a lot of advertising work over the years. Does that end up feeding back into Ital Tek or will you intentionally keep those projects separate?
Ninja Tune are my publishers, so they'll send me briefs and pitch ideas for adverts, and I like to keep busy and explore different creative paths. My Ital Tek stuff benefits from that in terms of keeping my mind occupied, but I’m not sure that it feeds back into what I'm doing sonically. What it does do is keep me excited to make my own music when I come back to it, because it’s the backbone of everything I do.