Nathan Clark’s obsession with music began with karaoke machine sessions at his grandparents’ house on Chicago’s west side. “I thought I was a child star,” he recalls with a smirk. “I had a song called ‘You’re My Girl’ when I was 8 years old.” As a teen, Nate used his dad’s address to attend a better high school on the north side of the city where, it turned out, students were footworking like crazy. Like a lot of kids, Nate watched a showcase on Channel 19, the public access station, put on by a dancer and DJ known as Tha Pope, with fast, four-on-the-floor juke rhythms that would evolve into footwork’s 160 BPM frenzy. Inspired, he started recording his own dance battles at school and putting them on YouTube. While he was at it, he figured he may as well learn to make songs on FruityLoops to give his classmates something to dance to.

By his senior year, Nate’s footwork show had grown so popular it got him booted out of high school; the principal had caught on that kids were ditching class to dance in his videos. “They said I had people’s grades slipping,” he laughs. He’d been having so much fun with his newfound notoriety that, for weeks after his expulsion, he showed up to classes anyway.

Having built a little following online, Nate and his friends started showing up at battles and footwork video shoots all around the city, supporting the scene by making personalized tracks for fellow dancers. But after a few years of local success, Nate was ready to give up on footwork to focus on rap and R&B, his earliest passions. Just around then, he got a message from Planet Mu.

“I first came across Nate’s tracks on a blog called Wayne & Wax, in 2008,” says the label’s founder, Mike Paradinas, by phone from London. “The tempo of it reminded me of hardcore and jungle—but quite different all the same. It was pretty exciting, because at the time, dubstep was really boring—it was all turning into EDM. But this was something that sounded very fresh.”

Did the British label’s IDM heads get into Nate’s music on first listen? “Oh, god no,” Paradinas chuckles. “Planet Mu fans certainly were quite vocal in the fact that they thought it was shit. A lot of people into IDM fetishize production rather than ideas. But on Nate’s side, the ideas, rather than the production, attracted me.” Planet Mu made plans for a world tour to support Da Trak Genious, but, well, shit happens. “Missed the tour,” Nate admits wryly. “They caught me at a crazy time. When the album was released, I was in jail.” In August 2010, he was arrested for attempting to elude the police at more than 20 mph over the speed limit; Nate says the incident took place after he was falsely accused of a robbery, and that he tried to drive away because he felt like he was in danger of being shot by the cops.