A great many changes have taken place in the last few years—in club music and in Andrew Weatherall’s career. He moved out of London to the countryside, forayed outside the UK for DJing gigs, issued Two Lone Swordsmen’s avant-dub Stay Down (Warp/Matador), and put his Emissions label on hiatus. It’s all made Weatherall a little older, a bit poorer, but a lot wiser.

“I’ve learnt from my mistakes—never invest your own money in your own business,” he advises morosely. “Rather than going into liquidation and not pay everyone what we owe them, we’re back to square one. We’ve got enough money to pay everyone who we owe. I was going to give up. I thought, ‘If you lose money and you make loads of mistakes, and just give up, then you’ve not learned anything.’ We’re going to start the label again, running it properly and keeping our overhead down.”

Travelling outside of England for DJ gigs is a new venture for Weatherall. “If I have a bad gig I get depressed for weeks,” he says, pointing out he’s ultra-sensitive to poor gigs. “When I traveled abroad before and had some really bad experiences, I gave up leaving the U.K. Then two or three years ago I started having some good gigs, and now I enjoy travelling more than I used to. It’s not overkill—I’m still taking gigs and not turning up.” Weatherall chuckles, aware of his no-show reputation.

Still, Weatherall’s DJ sets—a wide swath of soundtracks, crackling funk records, pungent reggae, hard house and techno—are eagerly sought by punters who know he plays a mix that caters to the party. “I know there are geeks on the Internet that have got lists of everything I’ve done,” says Weatherall. “They know more about me than I do.”

They’ve known about him since 1988, when he began DJing at Danny Rampling’s legendary Shoom, two years after starting Boy’s Own, one of the cheekiest publications on club culture ever printed. It later expanded into the label of the same name.

They’ve known about him since his initial foray into the studio alongside Paul Oakenfold on a remix for the Happy Mondays’ “Hallelujah.” That, of course, led to Weatherall earning producer’s points on the seminal rave-meets-rock Primal Scream work, Screamadelica.

They’ve known about him since he launched his own label, Sabres of Paradise, as well as a group of the same name that issued the now-classic “Smokebelch.” He then started Emissions Audio Output, a label split into three personalities: Lo-fi, Static and Echoic. Teamed with Keith Tenniswood (Dub Pistols, Radioactive Man), Weatherall since 1996 has operated under the moniker Two Lone Swordsmen and Rude Solo (named after a light on their mixing desk).

And it’s of Emissions Audio Output that Weatherall hopes to maintain strict control from here on out. The downsizing began with the studio, which will also eventually be moved to the country, but for now remains in London, one-third the size of its former self.

“I went with the smaller, trying to get to know less equipment more rather than having lots of things you dip into,” he says. “I’d rather have fewer machines, but know more about them. That’s how we get our sound.” And just how does he get that dubby, warm squelch on Stay Down?

“My essential piece is a valve compressor made by Neutronic,” he says. “They built it and gave it to us to test and we really liked it and they decided it was too expensive to put into commercial production. It is the only one in the world. The basis of our sound is that machine. It’s what gives us the warmth. We’ve got a sound module called the Virus, which we like a lot. A set of decks, a good compressor and an analog-based sound module is all you need.

“The best music at the moment is American folk music, which to me is either country-and-western, hip hop or techno. I envision a ghetto-based story music,” he says. “Working-class country singer or working-class black people singing about down things is life-affirming. It’s only weedy, middle-class white people singing about death that is miserable.”