I’m sure you’ve experienced this during your DJing lifetime: While listening to records in your apartment, you’re disturbed by a noisy neighbor who’s hammering nails into an adjacent wall. Rather than annoying you, however, the rhythm of the hammer driving the nails into the wall creates an interesting counter-rhythm to the beat of the 12-inch you’re reviewing; or maybe the pitch of the hammering suggests a beautiful harmony.

U.K.-based DJ Andrea Parker lives her life in this mode: “When I’ve been in the studio for a long time, and then I get back to the airport and the wheels will be squeaking, I instantly start thinking of rhythms and stuff. I think about rhythms in a lot of different ways, when I hear sounds just walking along the street.”

Parker captures these serendipitous sound encounters on her full-length debut, Kiss My Arp (Mo Wax). “Sneeze,” for instance, is built around an actual gezundheit; apparently the human nose makes a great synth. “That was just an accident,” says Parker. “I sneezed and it was on tape. I had a DAT player that I use to go out and record some sounds, and I was just in the car and I sneezed.”

Jumping from genre to genre – hip hop, trip hop, techno, ambient, dub, dream pop, industrial – without pledging allegiance to any, Kiss My Arp promises a lot of headaches for record store managers this year. The album does, however, cohere with its mood, which can only be described as “macabre.” Parker’s revolving-door dance beats collide with a menacing, black-and-white horror movie feel – imagine Lon Chaney back from the dead tripping out to “Planet Rock.” Basking in the lower end of the sound spectrum on tracks like “The Unknown,” “Melodious Thunk” and “Breaking the Code,” Parker repeatedly answers the question: “Bass – how low can you go?” Short of buying a test-your-bass-frequency CD, there’s not a record out right now that better gauges your subwoofer’s breaking point. This, no doubt, stems from Parker’s fascination with the classic ARP synthesizer.

“There’s the ARP 2500, the ARP 2600, and the ARP Odyssey – they’re the three that I sort of use a lot,” she says. “I just think they’ve got so much more balls to them than half of the machines around nowadays. I just love the fact that you can control the sound yourself, and you don’t really get the same sound twice, which is really interesting.”

This must sound like a nightmare to anyone who finds comfort in the preset world of digital sampling. “They [ARPs] are a pain to a certain extent,” she agrees, “but I used an ARP on every single track somewhere on the album, apart from ‘Sneeze.’ It’s just got a very heavy, weighty sort of sound and there’s a big difference between analog and digital. Digital’s just a bit too clean for me.”

To further satisfy her thirst for analog, Parker often falls back on her trusty old cello, which smoothes the harsher edges of Kiss My Arp. She laughs out loud, however, when asked if she’s a trained performer. “I had cello lessons,” she says, “but I’m not the sort of person interested in studying for years on end. I just kind of play the cello and layer it and sample it and mess around with it, tuning these sounds down and putting them through the ARP and stuff. As my string arranger Wil Malone says, ‘If you learn the same chords as everyone else you’ll be doing exactly the same thing as everyone else.’ And a lot of chords I play, I mean, I don’t always know what I’m doing, and I think that’s one of the interesting things sometimes.”