Meat Beat Manifesto are many things, but, outrageously enough, only to a few people. Jack Dangers remains a dance genius's dance genius, rather than a genuinely appreciated and acknowledged music bloke. Ever since the release of 'Storm the Studio', MBM have been developing an increasingly bizarre mix of breakbeats, dub basslines, ambient textures, and mad media-sampling vocal chaos. A serious band with a sense of humour, they have consistently produced comic classics of the sampling art of which 'Radio Mellotron' on the new album is the latest example. 'Satyricon,' the last and, in the ears of many, best MBM album, came out four years ago.

So what happened? "Well, after Satyricon came out, we did some gigs over here, we took it to the States, Europe, Australia, so that was one year out the way. Then I worked on an album with a band in America called Emergency Broadcast Network - their record hasn't come out over here yet, even though we did it back then. It's only just come out in the States two months ago. They use a lot of video - all their stuff is based around video, they sample everything, video, TV... they've got two lawyers who work trying to clear all the stuff, and it's taken them two years to do it all, so... that's imminent." You moved to San Francisco. "Yeah, I moved over there, and set up a studio, and I've moved twice since I've been over there, so all that obviously takes a lot of time out. I worked on the album for about ten months over a two year period. But the next album'll be out in the first half of next year: it just sort of went that way."

As the interview progresses, it becomes clear that the soundcheck in progress as we started has mutated into a full-on jamming session involving the various new members of the extended Meat Beat band. "Amazing fucking musicians. They're crazy, they need to play an instrument or else they go mad. We got in trouble at the hotel because the guitarist was playing a saxophone at three in the morning. They could be in the pub now, they don't need to be doing this." Has this sort of organic vitality influenced the sort of material MBM are producing now? "'Electric People' (on disc two of the new album) was actually edited down from six hours. We're thinking about doing a gig somewhere and doing just that one song, play it the entire length. The next album will be of this band. Hopefully this band will be the future of Meat Beat, cause this last record was mainly me, but this next record's gonna be all of us."

Talking to Dangers, who is in any case a genuinely friendly and frighteningly energetic geezer, you sense a man who knows his stuff: he talks animatedly about a Greek composer whose name we know not how to spell, but which sounds like Yenis Zenakis, who apparently invented ambient music in the 1950s. "He did this form of music which he called electro-acoustic music, but we know it as ambient music. He did this piece for the Brussels world fair in 1958, with four-hundred loudspeakers pumping out this music...it's not like musique concrète, it's like really long passages of taped music in and out of each other in slow dissolving loops, which was completely different at the time, 'cause musique concrète is all fast edits strung together, and this music just forms itself over eighteen minutes and then goes into two minutes of the most incredible noise I've ever heard, noisier than any Mark Stewart record."

We touch on the subject of music today. Does he feel any affinity with other musicians on the experimental fringe of dance music? "Yeah well, obviously Consolidated, the earlier stuff anyway. I've not worked on their new album. They've definitely gone more rrrock." They were quite hip-hop for a bit.. "Yeah well I injected all of that. I did all the beats and the basslines on 'Friendly Fascism,' but I was only credited with mixing it." Scandal!

Meat Beat Manifesto live is an essential experience, mixing dazzling synthesiser / sequencer work with highly skilled and imaginatively played live instrumentation, involving drums, guitar, saxophone, and theremin, Dangers presiding over it all with a manic look in his eye, and an irrepressible caper of his feet. As we file out contentedly into the night, we seem to hear Dangers's modest response to our question considering the Chemical Brothers and Orbital, who apparently think he's the dog's bollocks. "I thought I was the donkey's cock, actually. That's what they used to say."

Jack Dangers was talking to Malcolm, in June 1996.