"I always thought of the States as this great melting pot," Marks offers. "But it's not like that really, is it?" No, it's more tribal than that. "Whereas in the U.K., despite years and years of dominating and oppressing other cultures, we now actually have a multicultural society. For me, I grew up in London, and it was very common to be surrounded by Indian music one minute and reggae the next, eating Iranian food as you walked down the street. That's the world I grew up in. I just assumed the States was like that as well."

Even if you aren't bothered by the political implications of world music fusion, it's easy to get put off by the smug evangelizing of some of its proponents, who seem to think that it's every fan's duty to be a musicologist. Marks, refreshingly, doesn't seem concerned about whether Banco de Gaia fans discover the source music from which he borrows.

"I don't know what it is half the time," he laughs. "Friends go off traveling and come back and give me a tape - 'Oh, I picked this up in Caracas, you'll love it' - and at best it's got something scribbled on it in Spanish in bad handwriting. Personally, I don't really get into listening to a lot of world music. I like Western electronic fusion music. I don't particularly listen to Indian classical music, for example.

"The WOMAD [World of Music and Dance] festival, which we've played at a lot, their tradition is world music. And they've embraced the kind of stuff that I do, or that Whirl-Y-Gig or Transglobal Underground do, but there are plenty of purists who feel that what we do is western pop music and it shouldn't be there.

"And you also have the evangelists, who say, 'Come along, have a listen to the latest recording by these monks from the Ukraine' or something, which no one can fucking stand. So no, I'm not one of them."

Toby Marks has a sense of humor that so many of his dance music peers seem to lack. Even better, he's not overly precious about his music: the first single from new LP The Magical Sounds of Banco de Gaia is an uptempo stormer called "I Love Baby Cheesy." It's what you might call a Party Record.

"Yeah, I don't like taking it too seriously," he admits. "The last album, Big Men Cry, was relatively serious, in part because of what I was going through at the time. But this album is much more light-hearted, a bit tongue-in-cheek.

"The people who can enjoy life the most are the ones who can laugh at stuff. It's really the best way to get through stuff, to not get too serious about it. I guess I get a bit embarrassed about it as well, being so public. So I sort of make jokes to help me get over the uncomfortableness."

There's no need for Marks to be uncomfortable. After nearly ten years of making electronic music, he's still on his stride. The Magical Sounds... is his fourth studio album and fifth overall, and it's arguably the freshest, most immediate work he's done since Maya.

"The new album, to me, is more like Maya than any of the others," he agrees. The vibe of it, the energy -- I actually reach 135 BPM I think. That's a record [for me]."

Marks is half-kidding, but his relative immunity to techno's ever-accelerating tempos is illustrative of Banco's trend-oblivious approach. Emerging in Britain at the tail end of the ambient/trance's trendy years, Banco plowed an increasingly out-of-favor furrow in the middle of the decade.

"Ten years ago, when the whole acid house thing was kicking off, everything was 118-120 BPM, and it worked," he reminisces. "That was the 'magic tempo,' and everyone got off on it. But over the years, things have just gotten faster and faster, it's like, 'Well, I thought [120] was the magic tempo, how come 127 works?' (laughs). But it kind of left me cold, some of the faster tempo stuff. It was a completely different kind of music as far as I was concerned."

Planet Dog labelmates Eat Static, like so many trance and techno outfits, came to embrace jungle over the last few years. But while Banco's music shares dubwise roots with drum 'n' bass, he was unimpressed by the genre's sudden rise to prominence in Britain.

"The funny thing about jungle and drum 'n' bass is that it's been around for years," Marks says. "We called it hardcore in 1992. Suddenly it went big and everyone's like, 'What's this amazing new thing?' And I thought, 'Well, yeah, it's hardcore, innit?' It was never what I was into."