When Christopher Shively, aka producer, DJ, and label head Chrissy Murderbot, was pursuing his master’s degree in American studies at the University of Amsterdam in 2005, he had an epiphany. “I’m gonna sound like a horrible nationalist,” he says, “but I became convinced that when it comes to dance music, midwesterners and also the British get it in a way that other people don’t, because it’s native to us and we grow up with it. You can do your homework and be really knowledgeable about it, but you’ll never have that. It’s like speaking a native language versus a language you learn when you’re 15.”

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Just as native speakers are best equipped for subtle forms of wordplay, only a practitioner who really knows and loves dance music can treat it as unseriously as Shively does without sounding shallow—his approach can best be described as well-informed irreverence. It’s something he shares with a few notable collaborators—including Scream Club, who appear on his new self-titled album, due September 1 on his own Sleazetone label—as well as with some of the bigger names he’s opened for, among them the Bug and Kid606. So far most of the attention he’s gotten has been from within the midwestern scene—he’s old friends with Cody Critcheloe of Kansas City electro-punks Ssion and has recently fallen in with the local Ghetto Division crew—but despite his relatively low profile he’s far from an inconsequential player.

By the time he was 13, Shively was landing DJ gigs with the help of a promoter who noticed him buying vinyl at a dance-friendly record store. (“A lot of the stuff was not coming out on CD,” he explains.) He soon moved on to producing, though he admits he confronted a much tougher learning curve on that front.

“When an artist works across genres, sometimes there’s a little bit of a brand-identity problem for people,” Shively says. “But dance music in itself is such a narrow slice of the pie that if you limit yourself to ‘Oh, I just make dubstep’ or ‘Oh, I just make bleep house’ or ‘Oh, I just make this or that,’ there’s gonna come a time when you’ve painted yourself into a corner and it’s hard to keep working.”

“Yeah! Exactly! I just want to be able to ‘rep my hood,’ as it were.”