I read about the barn in which you made most of the last record (Clark, Warp Records) – how did that come about? I envision you looking on Craigslist or something for a place to hole up in.

Yeah, it was basically like that actually. I had just finished working with my girlfriend – she’s a dancer – and I scored this thing for her which was very much a collaboration experience, working with a lot of different people every day. Quite social. After that I fancied writing an album completely on my own. She was travelling for four months, so I thought right, I’m going to go write an album. I hired this barn in the middle of nowhere and just wrote it there basically, completely on my own really. I saw friends occasionally, I guess. I was talking about it today, you know, this thing of self-imposed, solitary work ethic. For me it really works, but Rival Consoles, who we’re touring with, he was like that’s fucking weird. I don’t know if I could do it again; I like each album to be different. Just radically change something every time you make a big body of work. It’s like a shock to the system and it really inspired me.

Is the new EP (Flame Rave, Warp Records) spare cuts from those sessions, or something new?

I did a similar thing in Germany, but I didn’t have as much time. It was sort of developed from stuff that was for the album, but it didn’t feel like b-sides. That EP feels more solid in a way because some of the tracks are really long, while some of the album stuff is more snappy.

You’d think we’d almost be past it, given that techno’s quite mainstream now, but are you still pressured to produce a single off an album?

Nah, not really. I really love pop music anyway, and I don’t mean that in an ironic way. I don’t really understand the mentality of being embarrassed about liking pop music. I like it, and what it is. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to consciously make it; my stuff isn’t poppy compared to say, Beyonce, but there are a lot of pop things in there. I like hooks, grooves.

So in your mind, there are no guilty pleasures.

Not in the slightest – it’s just a pleasure. I don’t really agree with the concept behind a guilty pleasure. It’s like dance music – people feel embarrassed to like certain things because they think it’s lower class or something, but it’s not. You can’t tell me that pop music is easy to make.

When you’re writing in isolation, especially in a rural environment, does that come through in the music at all? Is it weird to play a track off Clark in, say, a nightclub in Miami?

For me, music has so much to do with internal pictures, things that I need to get out of me and translate from the internal world to an artifact. It’s always lost in translation because it’s never as pure as how you conceptualize it in your own mind. It’s like it’s 4-D in your mind and it comes out and it’s this 3-D sort of thing, like an echo of it. It’s so introspective for me, not when I’m doing stuff for live shows and a lot of it is these primal loops and grooves, but the album is a very inward thing. Where I am doesn’t affect it that much.

When you’re putting an album out, you’re trying to put in a lot of very personal stuff then, which might be impossible to translate.

Yeah, I produce the environment rather than the other way around.

Speaking of your live work, is Phosphor still going on?

We really never developed it enough for a touring show – we just did those two tracks. We haven’t had time to put together a whole show, but it’s definitely on the back burner.

Was it a coordinated performance, or more improvisational?

It was like 80% coordinated and 20% improved. Vincent, the guy who did it, had lots of different plans and sounds that he would throw in at different points that could create variation. It’s like with my normal live show, elastic to a point but I like having some anchors.

I saw you describe it in another interview as an analog geometry accompanied by soulful techno.

[laughs] Did I say that?

Well I was wondering if you find it difficult to make evocative tunes without retreading what’s been done, given how rigid electronic music’s genre structures can be?

No, I don’t. The stuff I release has recently been quite techno, but it’s not all that I do. I write a lot of stuff that’s completely slippery and off-grid and not even to a metronome. You might look at the MIDI and it’s clusters of rhythm with no actual consistent tempo. If I didn’t do that I would feel limited by just having one thing.

How would you say that soul manifests itself in techno music?

Well I can’t imagine saying what you quoted, since I think soul’s a bit overused now, but I think there’s a definite emotional quality – something made with feeling without being sentimental or dipping into clinical technique. If there was a techno equivalent of like a Yes drum solo or like an Otis Redding bass solo, then some of the Detroit Techno would be it.

We’ve just hit the tail end of the whole EDM craze. Do you see any residual effects of that in your crowds?

I think some people expect to hear, I don’t know who the awful presets are. What is the sound of EDM? It’s like when you’re at the cinema and the adverts are blaring in your face. It’s the kind of music that if you were a gorilla then you might see someone wearing a bright blue tracksuit and think that’s the coolest thing that you could wear. The sounds in EDM are like that, things that people are impressed by who have no taste in music. You know it can be fun as well, though. If you went to a Skrillex rave and you were like 16 and it was huge and loud, it would be amazing. I can see the appeal, he’s not like a dumb guy.

In a sense I think all the serious music fans are a bit jealous that we’re maturing a bit too late to really catch it.

Yeah, yeah. I’m trying to think what the equivalent would be from when I was a kid, like Rage Against the Machine but more cheesy than that.

Are you going to be able to catch any other acts here today?

It’s pretty in and out, unfortunately a bit rushed at the moment.

Anyone you’re hoping for the opportunity to see, here or otherwise?

I’m trying to think. I really do like music… Run the Jewels. I’m not one of these people that feels like they need to keep up with the latest release every week, because I think good music just kind of stays around. I’ve been a Company Flow fan for ages and hearing that album just made me go back to all of their old stuff. It’s so good, just great hearing someone with that arc in their voice and yet the really early stuff is still very much him. I saw them live in Melbourne and they were great.

I was wondering to what extent touring with someone like Jon Hopkins, from last fall, or Nosaj Thing currently, allows for collaboration. With Run the Jewels or any of the big rap package tours, it seems like there are songs and tapes coming out from all the artists involved throughout. With how Clark was created though, it seems like it’d be a bit hard to link up on tour and arrange to meet at the barn later.

Hip-hop is so direct, like you can just plug a mic in. When Ryan [of Rival Consoles] and I played he was just on keys and we just made something really quickly. I really like the idea of doing that – I don’t want to promise anything but we could do loads of music on tour. It feels very wrong to not be writing music on tour.

Do you play a lot of DJ sets or mostly your own stuff? What’s the scope of the unreleased music that you bring into existence or get handed that you just don’t think will ever come out?

Yeah, mostly my own stuff. I just find it easier to write a lot of stuff, much more than can fit on an album. I write far too much and it really annoys me. It’s quite easy to write loads of music and just have hundreds of tracks that just sit around. It’s much harder to write something that you go back to again and again. It’s so easy to start music and then finish it to a certain level, but the next level where you can listen back and still notice things is totally different. I’ve still got the end melody of To Live and Die in Grantham looping around my head because I spent around two weeks writing every part of it. I still really like it. It’s always really rewarding when you work on a track like that rather than just bashing them out. I try and release the stuff that I work on a lot.

I’ve become really interested in the social dynamic of Soundcloud recently. I think a big part of it is that the kids are like 18, but the model seems to be putting out tracks every couple days. Maybe there’s a little dilution but it’s a really amazing work ethic.

It really is. I think you can have your Soundcloud shit and then your released stuff. I don’t think everything has to be a labored masterpiece, I think there’s a balance that all the artists I really like hit – they can just bash stuff out and they can go right, I’m going to do something big now. You don’t want to always have to be laboring over something that’s really important.

Have you noticed any sort of difference in Warp’s business and methods since Soundcloud came and vaporized the barriers to entry for music creation?

Well they say that putting stuff on Soundcloud means that people won’t buy music anymore, but I think that’s going to happen anyway. It’s a shrinking market.

It’s an interesting venue, what with the semi-constant threat of it all disappearing since they can’t figure out how to make money.

Really? I hadn’t heard about that. So one day it all might just go? Imagine if it all just evaporated.

It’d be vaporwave’s final act – the whole thing just disappears.

That’s the whole internet – the idea of it disappearing. We’re at the point with technology where we’re liberated by it now, everything getting smaller and smaller. I was talking about it with a friend with regards to classical music – playing a piano or a violin seems really outmoded because we’ve got these wonderful laptops and hardware that all feels very modern. I think in 200 years the idea that you even use objects to make music will seem weird. It’ll all just be internal and thought-based.

That’s almost the dream; I think any music maker is pursuing a one-to-one translation from what they’re hearing.

Maybe not even having to hear it, just going to pure stimulation.

There’s a pretty big generative music program at my university – they put some buoys out in the San Francisco Bay and mapped their altitude as they’re bobbing to a traditional piano keyboard. The extent to which it’s producing tunes at this point is limited, but it’s out there.

That’s crazy. You can hear in your dreams, or in nature, but not songs. I never have ideas for songs in dreams, but I get the most intense sound design shit – really detailed structures, and I can remember them really clearly. I wake up and I can approximate it, it can be an audio thing in the real world but it’s not dependent in my ears. I wonder where that’s going to go in the future.