Kirk Degiorgio describes himself as 'a soul boy, a casual', a product of suburban 'terrace culture'. Working under the name As One, he has been producing electronic dance music for over five years. In that time he has released records using other pseudonyms - Future/Past, Esoterik - but As One is the project which allows him to link personal roots with a highly evolved approach to digital synthesis.

For Kirk 'perverse modernism' describes the point at which the creative process disengages from the world, losing all meaning as it jettisons any emotional or functional 'baggage', adopting a pose of abtruse detatchment.

'I get angry when people deride soul music for being soulful,' he says. 'I don't know if its because I had a happy upbringing, but I don't relate to the punk ethic or angst. That's probably why I was into soul from such an early time. Soul for me was about losing your girlfriend, or good time music. It creases me up when the NME review a soul album and go on about the lyrics; the lyrics are irrelevant. For me it was all about 'Going To the Disco'.

There's an element of racism there as well. I did an interview with a French magazine and they said: you say you're into black music, but your music is very refined. Can't black music be refined? It's not overt racism, but people need to think about it and not make those kind of assumptions.'

Now aged 29, Kirk Degiorgio was born in London but grew up in Ipswich. When he was 11 an aunt gave him a copy of Funkadelic's One Nation Under A Groove. It was a pivotal moment. 'It's such a strange record to be into when you're that age, but it changed my life,' he says. 'Looking back I can see that P. Funk was black psychedelia'.

So his immersion in the realm of black electronic music began as a grass roots family affair. What did he hear in this fledgling music that had such a profound effect?

'The combination of the rhythms and the electronics; as far as electronic riffs go, Bernie Worrell blows away all Techno producers. I said to Carl (Craig); instead of working with Steve Hillage, why not work with Bernie Worrell? That's what I always wanted for Techno. That's why I'm glad drum 'n' bass came along; it blew away all the elements of Techno I wasn't relating to, it brought it back to a street culture. It really transcends race, but it brought a black element back to the music.'

Ipswich isn't the centre of any particular universe, perhaps, but in the early 80s Kirk was alert to the seismic shifts that were taking place in black music on the other side of the Atlantic.

'I remember when I heard 'Planet Rock' it freaked me out,' he says, describing a familiar epiphany. 'It was more of a shock hearing that than it was hearing anything to do with Techno. 'Planet Rock', then Cybertron's 'Clear'. It was the use of electronics, which I hadn't heard outside of P-Funk, the electronic basslines on Funkadelic stuff. This was taking it one step further. I wasn't aware of the Kraftwerk connection.

'After 'Looking For the Perfect Beat' I wrote to Tom Silverman,' he continues, Silverman being the ex-dance music journalist who founded the Tommy Boy label in 1982 in order to release Afrika Bambaataa's first revolutionary tracks. 'He gave me membership of the Future Beat Alliance, a T-shirt and signed things of Afrika Bambaataa. (He laughs at the memory) I was into it that much. In 83 (Man Parrish's) 'Hip Hop Be-Bop' really brought it on, then there was a great scene'.

Kirk started running a club night in Ipswich called Sweat, and DJed for local breakdance contests, meeting Ed Handley and Andy Turner, who would go on to work with Ken Downie as the Black Dog.

'Ed and Andy were part of a breakdance crew just outside Ipswich, near where John Peel lives. They used to come in and battle the Ipswich breakdance crews. Myself and a couple of other guys used to save up, we'd hire a couple of cars, come down to Groove Records (in London) and buy all the new electro stuff. This would be 83, 83; I think it had faded out by 85.

Breakdancing was still quite difficult then, so most people used to body-pop instead. I used to play things like 'The Smurf', Tyrone Brunson. It wasn't until later on, late 83/84 - I'm trying to get the dates right - that the rap thing started sneaking in, with The Cold Crush Brothers and Run DMC.'

Partly inspired by the release of 'The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash On the Wheels of Steel', and the emergence of homegrown slice 'n' dice DJ records such as Coldcut's 'Say Kids What Time Is It', he began experimenting with his own tracks. 'I only had one deck at home so I used to use the pause button on my tape deck and make these mix tapes, in 84/5, learning edits and stuff.'

The influence of the formative period can still be detected in his current music: the title track of his 1995 Celestial Soul album, for instance, has a backing track that is pure Electro synth-squelch, while 'Laetoli' and 'Ariois' source rhythms from half-forgotten 70s funk and jazz albums. While Flash and Coldcut would orchestrate this kind of mutable raw material into symphonic street corner collages, Degiorgio planes them into a series of electronic soul sonatas for edge-city cosmopolitans.

'I got into spotting names on label credits with disco, so I was always aware of DJ/producers,' he says, referring to 70s disco-era jocks such as Tee Scott, Larry Levan and Francois Kervorkian. 'They were all DJs who got into producing, so it felt natural to me when DJs started making records in the 80s, it had a long tradition.'

In the late 80s he moved back to London, working at Reckless Records in the West End, meeting members of Autocreation and Stereolab, blowing his wages on imported 12" singles from new and mysterious American electronic music labels like Metroplex, Transmat, Trax, Dance Mania: immersing himself in record shop culture. I've always been a collector, but because of working in a shop I had every House and Techno record that came out, all catalogued, no gaps. I used to love it in Reckless on a Saturday, it was the perfect education for me. It stimulates a lot of creativity, just hanging around record shops.'

In 1991 he travelled to Chicago on a record-buying trip. He had already met Derrick May in London, and had been invited to visit May at his home in Detroit.

'We drove over to Detroit from Chicago, knocked on his door, and Juan Atkins opens it,' he says still stunned by the memory of coming face-to-face with the producer responsible for Cybertron's 'Clear', Model 500's 'Night Drive Thru Babylon' and other defining texts of Midwest Electronica. 'They were impressed because we knew Cybertron; we hit it off straight away. he introduced us to everyone. Derrick was out of town, but Kevin Saunderson was next door in KMS, he'd just got all his money from Inner City, so he had a big studio. There was the Metroplex office, next door was the studio. Then Juan said there's an English guy living upstairs in Derrick's flat; we couldn't believe it.'

This was Matt Cogger, who would later release his own idiosyncratic Techno tracks under the name Neuropolitique.
'He was the original, the first person to go and seek those guys out,' says Kirk. 'We hooked up with him, he introduced us to more people, showed me around the Metroplex studio and that's when I thought, yep, I'm going to sell my collection when I get home, get a studio. I was totally inspired by it.'

The Metroplex complex was located on a street that was 'quite heavy in places', as Kirk puts it. Witnessing the conditions in which his heroes had to work forced him to reassess some received wisdoms of his own.

'I'd lived in London for a couple of years, but Ipswich isn't exactly good grounding to be prepared for some urban devastation like that. It altered the way I thought about the music. Detroit music for me was P-Funk and Motown. As I got into jazz, guys like Joe Henderson, Alice Coltrane, Yusef Lateef, Donald Byrd were all from Detroit, I believe. They go to college, move onto other cities, but for music like that to come out of a city there must be a deep emotional energy that the environment puts on people who live there. But because Detroit is a black city run by blacks, and it's failed, because of the government, perhaps, its almost as if the young middle-class blacks in Detroit, like Carl and Kenny (Larkin) have rejected black music in their youth and gone for European stuff. Carl used to listen to The Smiths, Flying Lizards, B-52s, it's well documented. Derrick is a great fan of Frankie Goes To Hollywood. His music is trying to have an intellectual escape from the environment, it's an intellectual pursuit. It's as if they've turned their backs on the black element in their city, because there was little to be proud of in terms of the environment, and inspired to European music. It's dodgy territory, but it's the only explanation I can think of.'

The first tracks Degiorgio produced were made using one drum machine, a primitive sampler, and a DX100 keyboard which had been left behind in London by Derrick May and which he shared with Matt Cogger. 'The drums are very minimal, very clean, hardly any effects, all very dry, a couple of layers of synth lines and a bassline,' is how he describes them now. 'I always thought I'd be able to learn electronic equipment. I'd never touched an instrument til I went into Black Dog's studio, before they'd released any records. Everything felt natural: drum machines, samplers. Derrick used to say it's best to just have a couple of pieces of kit and get to know them inside out, that's why I've only got a few bits of equipment even now, but those few pieces are top-of the-range.'

Via Black Dog, he started making connections with other musicians/producers who were beginning to emerge under the 'Intelligent Techno' banner, releasing tracks run on labels run by B12 and Rephlex, as well as Carl Craig's new Planet E imprint, and signing to the New Electronica label alongside Matt Cogger. When the GPR label rejected Black Dog's 'Nort Route' track he formed his own imprint, ART, in order to release it. ART subsequently became Op-Art, renamed as tribute to the 60s art movement headed by Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely.

'I wish I'd lived in the 60s, it's my favourite era,' says Kirk. 'It really was a loose time; the art, the politics, the music, the fashion, the whole counter-culture. My favourite period for music is probably from 64-68: Wayne Shorter, Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Henderson, Andrew Hill, those classic Blue Note albums. I enter a different world when I hear those tracks.

'Blue Note was the label I looked up to when I formed my own label,' he continues. 'Everything they did was just perfect: their attitude about the way they made the covers, the sleeve art, the way they got the best heavyweight vinyl; the way they got Rudy Van Gelder to engineer. That's an example of the importance of engineering. Before Blue Note you couldn't really hear a cymbal on a jazz record; Rudy Van Gelder pioneered that whole idea of the importance of the recording.'
Although his DJ work has receded since the days of Electro, Kirk has recently released a mix album, Check One: Applied Rhythmic Technology, which serves as a personal manifesto and an attempt to reposition Techno in a continuum of 30 years of black science fiction, segueing tracks by Carl Craig, Stacy Pullen and the Jedi Knights into Herbie Hancock, Julien Priester and Bobby Lyle.

'I don't fit the standard requirements for a Techno producer' he says. So instead of discussing the relative merits of digital music hardware, we go on to talk about Early Music, its use of the Dorian and Lydian (as opposed to chromatic) scales, and the reappearence of those scales centuries later in the modal jazz of Miles Davis and Yusef Lateef. We swap record collectors' tales of Chicago warehouses full of stretch-sealed copies of impossibly rare albums released in the 70s, discuss the crucial presence, for a soul boy, of singers such as Dee Dee Bridgewater and Jean Carn on albums by Carlos Garnett and Pharoah Sanders; talk about the influence of obscure New York disco labels such as Queen Constance and Heavenly Star, both run by an infamous producer called Peter Brown, as well as Kirk's visits to the MOMA and Guggenheim museums in New York, and the trip he once made to the Middle East, which impressed upon him the importance of experiencing other cultures at first-hand.

'If you have the money, you owe it to yourself,' he says. 'Outside influences do have an effect, and I try and fit what I do in the studio into a broader picture'.