Kieran Hebden occupies an enviable place in contemporary music. Comfortably straddling the avant-garde and the accessible with his output as a member of post-rockers Fridge and on his own as Four Tet, DJing all over Europe and remixing artists from His Name Is Alive to Two Banks Of Four, it certainly looks as though his moment in the sun has arrived as he performs in the baking heat of Barcelona's Sonar festival.

"I have been quite careful about it and I have really wanted that," he says when asked about the duality of his position within the electronic establishment. "I've spent a couple of years making sure I don't find myself pigeonholed, either in some cheesy, corporate pop world or a horrendous, geeky experimental bracket. I don't really like the snobbishness of that scene and have never wanted to get wrapped up in that kind of narrow-mindedness. I've always embraced a wide variety of music and have never seen that there's anything wrong with, or odd about, making a post-rock record by day and then going out and playing hip hop or UK garage when I DJ in a club. It's really important to keep things lively and have a sense of fun about what I do because I really enjoy it and you can push people a bit further like that too."

These myriad influences can be clearly heard throughout the artist's prolific recording career, from his earliest meanderings with Fridge to Pause, the latest Four Tet album on Domino Recordings. The free-jazz of Ornette Coleman collides with the Krautrock grooves of Neu!, R&B-style production trips over two-step rhythms and bucolic guitars, while Kieran himself quietly gets on with the job of making the music he loves. It's that simple – no categories, no boundaries, no worries. "It's amazing really. I have had this fairy tale life where I've just been able to do a lot of things I really want to do," he considers. "Fridge were a school band to begin with; myself, Adem Ilhan and Sam Jeffers met at comprehensive school in Putney, and us starting to release music at all came about from a chance meeting with someone in a record shop who put us in touch with Trevor Jackson from Output records. Then I began working as Four Tet more or less by accident because we couldn't get together as a band very often while we were at university. I was at college in Manchester and bought a computer and just started experimenting with my own music. And to be honest I never know what I'm going to be doing in three months' time, but I like that as it leaves you open to new opportunities."

Ironically, this apparently laissez-faire approach has led Kieran, still only in his mid-twenties, to formulate increasingly clear-cut ideas of just where he is heading. Signing a deal with Go Beat enabled Fridge to leave college and concentrate on making music full-time, culminating in 1999's stunning Eph, an album he variously describes as the record the band "always wanted to make," and their "prog-rock epic".

However, aside from a slot as Badly Drawn Boy's backing band on tour last year, most press cuttings concentrate on Kieran's solo work; from the smudgy, sax-strewn textures of his debut LP Dialogue to the pastoral harmonies of his new offering. "I suppose I can see the reason behind that," he says "Fridge are quite studio-based and we've never been a traditional rock band. So the kind of big tours that bands like Mogwai do aren't really for us and that's where a band gets a lot of its recognition. But if you work on your own with a computer, using things like vocals and breakbeats, then people seem to be far more willing to tap into it at the moment. "It's a strange time for music. Still, I've always made a point of embracing the new without worrying whether it ends up all over magazines or the radio, so it doesn't bother me at all. I mean, Happiness, the next Fridge album which is due out my own label Text in October, has virtually no beats on it – it's full of chiming bells and things instead. Both projects are completely different entities and totally separate, yet they still feed off and fertilise one another."

But Pause marks a brave step into uncharted territory, fusing zithers, plucked strings and the sound of leaves rustling in the wind with tough, uncompromising rhythm structures and jarring, yet deceptively simple studio techniques. In fact, Glue Of The World and You Could Ruin My Day conjure images of tranquillity gone awry; like dreaming the day away in a rural idyll, only to be pulled back to reality by the sound of police sirens rushing past. Gone is the mysticism of Sun Ra and the motorik throb of Can, replaced by a strange and contrary set of soothing pastoral vignettes, underpinned with a palpable sense of dystopian disquiet. "With Eph and through Dialogue I was hooked on free jazz and that whole blissed-out sound of people like Don Cherry," Kieran says. "But when I made Pause, I was listening to a lot of folk music. The thing I like most about electronic music though, be it hip hop, techno or whatever, is repetition and the fact that there's something you can lock into. So I had the idea of making a record that brought those two styles together, because that was what I really wanted to hear but couldn't find anywhere – an album of urban folk songs."