Self-managed, self-produced, Kieran Hebden is used to bucking the trends and everything ecstatic, the fourth album in his four tet guise, is no different, he tells Jim Carroll

It was the first time Kieran Hebden had ever been in a recording studio. He had made three albums prior to this with his post-rock ensemble Fridge, but they had been home-grown affairs. This, though, was the biggest, shiniest, most expensive studio in London and they were sitting in the swivel chairs, messing around.

There were others in the room too. Legendary hip-hop producer Arthur Baker was there to produce Electronic, a group featuring Bernard Summer from New Order and Johnny Marr from The Smiths.

"Some of what we did is on the album," Hebden says. "The mad bleeping noises, that's probably us. Arthur Baker had heard Fridge on the radio and really liked it so he wanted us to come in to add another layer of sound and input to the Electronic album. I didn't know who Johnny Marr was, I hadn't heard of The Smiths, though I knew about New Order. I was more excited about being in a studio."

But not that excited. "What struck me most was how slow it was," remembers Hebden. "I was used to recording two or three tracks a day and here we were, working on the high-hat sound for the whole day. It was interesting, but it didn't make me think I had to use studios, it was more getting it out of my system."

Hebden is not one to spend much time on the high-hat. In the last couple of years, this electronic wizard has notched up an astonishing amount of releases and it's Everything Ecstatic, his fourth album of mesmerising, imaginative electronica as Four Tet, which is on the agenda today. Recorded in the same front-room of Hebden's Camden flat in north London which is now multi-tasking as an interview location, Everything Ecstatic is as merry and giddy and dizzy as electronic albums ever come nowadays.

"I wanted to celebrate the euphoria in music, the kind of euphoria and, I suppose, celebration you get in a lot of religious music," explains Hebden. "Seeing music generating that level of excitement is why I like free jazz records so much. I wanted to make a record which said that music is the important thing in the universe, so let's play it loud and be really excited about it. I think electronic music has become too introspective and I didn't think it was at all appropriate to be making a calm, thoughtful record at this time."

It was also a riposte in a way to Rounds, the 2003 album which was Hebden's most successful Four Tet release and which introduced him to a whole new audience. It may not have got him on The OC, but it introduced him to Radiohead's huge fanbase when he toured with them and saw him shouldering a tag - folktronica - which made him shudder.

This time around, he decided to folk off and make a completely wild record.

"There's probably a more drastic divide between the last two albums than anyone saw coming," he says. "I think it's important to do that because Rounds made such a statement and was so significant that anything similar would have had people going: 'Oh I like it but it's not as good as Rounds'."

Yet he did learn plenty from making that album, including about showing some emotion. "When I first started making music, I was quite naïve. People would ask me what the music was about and what I was feeling and I'd fob them off. . . 'No, no, it means nothing, I'm just making music'. In retrospect, when I listened back to it, the early music reflected what was going on in my life..

"I think Rounds was the first time that I embraced the idea that the album would be a musical diary of my life. I spent a year making it and the music became as much a part of my everyday life as brushing my teeth or making toast or visiting my friends. Every day, I'd make the music I needed to make sense of what was happening in my life. It made the emotional content really significant."

Naturally, he plotted a completely different course when it came to recording the next record. "With Everything Ecstatic, I wanted a sound which was quite tense and aggressive and wild, so I decided to make it really fast so there was never time to get mellow or laboured."

The sounds and textures that coat the album may sound alien to some ears (chiefly because we don't hear a lot of them in other music), but Hebden is confident his audience can deal with it. "You have to have respect for your audience and be confident that they can cope with weird sounds. I think American hip-hop and r'n'b are very inspiring in that regard because they have a very progressive attitude to weird sounds.

"The biggest club hits that sell millions are done by producers who take really bold, brash steps. Someone like Rodney Jerkins put out a Whitney Houston record with thumb pianos on it and it was a massive hit. That's so open-minded and confident."

Yet Hebden acknowledges that there's a huge cultural and social chasm spanning the Atlantic which accounts for why we'll never hear thumb-pianos on a Robbie Williams record. "The whole nature of American hip-hop is to be big and bold, to look and sound as outlandish as possible. But it's stuff like Dido that sells loads of records over here because the whole aim is to produce bland music that you can sell in Asda or Tesco."

Hebden's music is unlikely ever to share supermarket shelf-space with baked beans or olive oil, but he's not unduly concerned. After all, there are other things to get excited about. He talks about tours to come (two small bags by the door contain the sum total of what he needs to put on a show) and a record he's recorded with jazz drummer Steve Reid, to be released in the coming months.

"He studied drumming in Africa with Fela Kuti and then came back and played with James Brown and Sun Ra," says Hebden of Reid. "Before that, he was a house drummer at Motown. He was the best person in the world to bring all the things I wanted to my music. To see this guy play these amazing heavy beats which I had dreamed about was incredible and very moving.

"When I make my own music, there are levels to the rhythms and drums that I am reaching for, but I feel I will never get. I'm a middle-class guy from London and I just know that I will never make a record which has that, but Steve Reid is the epitome of that sound."

For Hebden, this is the good life. "I'm having a really, really good time by only doing the things I want to do in my own way at my own pace. I get to make the records I want to make and play shows all over the world." Self-managed right down to booking his live shows himself, Hebden sees no reason to change a winning formula. "The only reason a manager would want to get involved would be to generate more money, so I'd have to start probably doing music at fashion shows. I don't want to do that, I would much rather be playing to 200 kids in a small room in a town somewhere. There's a demand and an interest in what I'm trying to do so why change it?"