Imagine a nightclub that takes place in a town hall and closes at midnight. It serves no alcohol, allows children and dogs, and the DJ plays CDs while sitting on cushions behind a curtain. Half the clientele are frighteningly young ravers, the other half bearded hippies of indeterminate age. The whole place reeks of incense, there are giant balloons bouncing around and the same people dance to the same songs every week.

That club is the Whirl-Y-Gig. On paper, it is a horrendous New Age nightmare. In reality, it may be the best club in the world, some kind of alchemical anomaly guaranteed to sucker punch the most grizzled rave cynic back to the glory days.

The knockout blow is The Parachute. At 11:50, the ecstatic dancefloor citizens suddenly topple like dominoes as a giant piece of fabric passes over their heads and across the main room. Good soldiers around the perimeter hold the edges of The Parachute, waving it up and down as if unfolding a bedsheet, blowing cool air through the overheated crowd as strangers pass around funny cigarettes and smile at one another. On a good night, Banco de Gaia's exotic ambient classic "Sheesha" served as the perfect soundtrack to The Parachute.

That's how I first heard Banco de Gaia. Within months The Parachute was a weekly ritual for me, and Banco's debut LP Maya rarely left the stereo. A lot has changed since then, but the Whirl-Y-Gig still seems like a very vivid dream, and Maya still spends a lot of time in my CD Player.

"I just listened to it for the first time in ages a little while ago, and it still sounds good," Toby Marks replies when I ask him what he thinks of Banco's still-striking world/techno/ambient debut, five years down the road. "One thing I'm really pleased about is that, for whatever reason, I've avoided being fashionable. That's made it very hard over the years - to get press, get attention, get stuff out there - but it also means that what I've done is write music first and foremost and worry about whether it's ambient or trance or whatever else afterwards. That means that 10 years down the line, it still sounds good, I hope. It doesn't date, the way more fashion-conscious music does."

You don't have to spend much time with Toby Marks to realize that fashion-consciousness is not a chief concern. Draped in a hippyish hooded poncho and looking preternaturally relaxed behind tiny sunglasses, he might recall Jeff Bridges' "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski if he weren't so unmistakably English. We're at the Phoenix, a "Legendary Rock 'n' Roll Hotel," or the closest thing San Francisco has to such an establishment. The innkeepers have offered us a room for the interview, which is garishly decked out in the finest '70s synthetic fibres. Unfortunately, the room is hot. So hot that Toby begins to hunt for a glass of water, only to think better of it. "It's a freshly cleaned room," he suggests. "I don't want to dirty their glasses." God bless the English.

It's difficult to take Banco de Gaia out of its English context. The collision between electronic, Eastern and Jamaican music that occurred in the early 90s couldn't really have happened in the U.S., and indeed, very few of its proponents (Banco, Transglobal Underground, Astralasia, the Planet Dog label) ever made an impact stateside. Marks certainly recognizes the divide.