For some there's an obvious path in life. Matthew Herbert has been playing music for as long as he can remember, taking up the piano and violin at the tender age of four. His father was a sound engineer for the BBC, and as a result the young Herbert was exposed to his extensive collection of musical gadgetry that lay around the home. At school, a music teacher heavily into jazz and pioneering composers such as Steve Reich gave musical insights that were beyond his years, while at university he studied drama in a conscious effort to avoid the clutches of classical music training. It was during these years spent in higher education that he first began to use sampling techniques in an exploration of the relationship between music and performance.

Around the same time he began considering the release of music he had been producing over the years, debuting in late 1995 with the house-inflected Herbert – Part One on his own Phono imprint. A few months later in January 1996, three singles followed: Herbert – Part Two, and subsequent material under two different pseudonyms – the abstract techno of Wishmountain and jazzy electro of Dr Rockit.

1997 saw his first appearance as Radioboy, representing common elements of each of his former monikers but pushing them to their limits. "The Radioboy stuff is supposed to be just sonic exploration really," he explains, "It's the idea of taking sampled sounds to the extreme. The Dr Rockit stuff – I add music to that, but it's more downbeat, or stylistically all over the place. Herbert is again the same ethos with sampled sounds, but in a house context."

Taking cues from the Musique Concrete movement, a large part of Matthew's music has incorporated everyday sounds extrapolated to the formula of dance music in its varying forms. With potential sample fodder constantly present, objects included at points in his back catalogue have included bottles, bikes, radios, cameras, drills, and crisp packets – often concentrating on one particular source and utilising it in several different ways. Bit of a sample-a-holic then, eh? "No, I'm not obsessed with sound; it'd be like trying to see everything, everywhere, at once – there's no way you could do it. So, I'm more relaxed about it than I used to. I've always got a Minidisc and a mic, particularly travelling – you always hear amazing sounds when you're abroad because you're more receptive to something new."

In addition to his electronic/dance productions, Matthew Herbert has maintained a steady output of music for film projects, several of them feature length. Perhaps not surprising bearing in mind his drama experience, but nevertheless such activities are an impressive addition to the workload – and something often aspired to yet rarely accomplished by many electronic recording artists. Speaking about current projects he divulges that "there's a couple that I can't talk about for contractual reasons until they're made official, but it's pretty good stuff. There's a film that I'm doing in New York, which is quite a big one, then there's one in France which is kind of a house musical..."

Such high-profile activities aside, Matthew Herbert is also well-known for his stunning live performances in which he samples from a host of objects on stage. As Herbert, he takes vocalist Dani Siciliano and pianist Phil Parnell on the road with him to help present his wobbly perspective on house music, sampling vocals and manipulating sounds gathered on the spot. "We try and sample as much of Dani's voice as possible in real-time and play bits of that in, and then I'm doing little bits of the Radioboy show as well which is much more explicit sampling of percussion and stuff."

While in his own words he was "never supposed to be a DJ", Matthew has played out at over 300 clubs and events in recent years, travelling the globe in the process. "I've slowed down a bit these days because I'm doing film work, but I still DJ at least once a week pretty much, and have done for five or six years now." Busy guy then, I ask? "I think if you're independent, or striving to be independent and you're self employed then you have to work pretty much continuously. Not necessarily seven days a week, but you have to do enough, firstly so that you keep your creative interest going, and secondly to keep momentum and keep the business side going. If you don't get up in the morning and write some music for a film, no one else from the company is going to do it – even though my company is just me. I have no objection to doing what I love and getting paid for it."

A new mix album for Tresor named Let's All Make Mistakes marks the first time his mixing skills have been committed to disc. The title highlights an admirably humble approach to DJing, and also an affinity with the abstracted. Matthew's innovative production style translates through his track selection. "I think it's a really important thing for me to do, at this point. Firstly to give some exposure to some amazing music which pretty much gets lost... I mean, it's known in the underground – stuff like Traktor, but beyond that it's not really heard of. Also, it's a reaction... it's important at this point I think as a reaction to the way that techno has become very linear, and house has become really repetitive. DJ compilations tend to be all on one level, or one style so it's important for me to show the other side of the coin. Also – I never record for other labels, so it's quite a big step for me."

Earlier in the year, Dan Bell's well-received The Button Down Mind of...' on Tresor’s Globus Mix series trod the ground between house and techno with a refreshingly twitchy slant, and featured three Herbert tracks in one way or another (two being remixes). "It was one of the first times that I've heard my music mixed in a way that I was happy with" says Matthew, and it was this that paved the way for his own contribution. "When Dan Bell did a mix CD for them a few of my tracks were licensed, so we entered into discussions after that. Dan's a friend of mine so it was nice for it to be a friendly thing – it's been a really fun project to do..."

With a new Herbert album in the pipeline, it seems that Matthew is going to be busy for quite some time to come. However, he explained how the album's composition has been underway for quite some time. "Some of the songs I've been writing for about five years, and there are a few that I started three or four years ago, and one that I started six years ago. It's been an ongoing process really... and it's nice to put that amount of work into it accidentally. I didn't plan it like that."