"I learned a long time ago that people don't go out to sit and watch ambient noodling," he continues, "You might sit back on your sofa in your living room and space out to a Banco album, but you don't want to do that in a club. So the live shows tend to be more uptempo; on the whole, we stay away from the slow tunes, we shorten the intros, and we keep things moving. But what I don't do and what a lot of dance acts do is (and what I think is a real shame) is that we don't make it a solid 130BPM for an hour and a half.

"When I was growing up I used to go see rock bands--Black Sabbath, for example--and the first three tunes would be fast and the fourth would be a ballad. That dynamic--that light and shade--is something that I really miss in dance music. This is the difference between DJ-ing and live music. A DJ doesn't want that light and shade--they don't want people standing around on the dance floor for five minutes. People go out, they want to kick around, burn off energy, they don't want too many long intros." He pauses to smile. "They don't want too many ballads."

You see, it's all about the beats. While a number of Banco de Gaia tunes may try to claim ambient status, and for short sections, they certainly qualify, it does always come back to the beats. There's an insistent pulse in Marks' thought process as he's crafting a song and he doesn't try to fight it. "Gizeh" on Igizeh begins with one of his location recordings from the Great Pyramid in Egypt, a hollow echo of an immense space and into this space wanders the ghost of a long-dead clarinet player. The clarinet melody has its moment, fades, and then comes back in the company of a loose beat structure which takes the company out of the dank solitude of the stone monolith to the sunlit sandy plains.

And correct for Banco de Gaia is a sweet mélange of beats and textures and rhythms and sounds from around the world. This, then, may be the definitive answer to the eternal question which plagues Toby Marks: why "Banco de Gaia"? Marks has taken to writing increasingly hilarious answers to that question on his website. Why? Because the real answer is probably right there in front of us. The whole world is his source of inspiration. It's all right there waiting for him. "When I'm writing, when I'm recording, I'm dealing with sound," Marks says. "I make sound collages is the way I see it. I just takes bits of sound and stick them together and make interesting patterns. What a sound theoretically is or what its conceptual basis--it's political or social basis--might be is kind of irrelevant. At the end of the day, what you hear is all that I'm working with. To me, a drum loop from a rock drummer in the U.K. or a sitar line from an Indian player are just sounds--they have their own texture and color and flavor--but it doesn't matter what their background is to me in that sense. Sometimes it amazes me that it is such a big deal for people. 'He uses world music! That's weird!' But it is just a sampler. The sampler doesn't say, 'Made in the U.K. You can only use U.K. sounds.' (They're all made in Japan anyway). I think it would be kind of weird to just use world music or ethnic music samples. It would be an interesting thing to do, but I think I need the anchor--the familiarity of Western music--as well. If, in the process, it opens people up to accepting other cultures and other forms, then great! But I'm not on any sort of crusade to do that."

And when asked about changing the world through his music, Marks gives me a tiny smile. "I don't think I'm the right person to do that. The way the music industry has gone in the last ten years has been to become so centralized--there are three transnationals who are pretty much running the whole show and they are deciding what gets released on the pop market--the mass market--and they're developing the Britney Spears and the Christina Aguileras and whatever else. That is what people are being given. The choices are very slim now. People who just want to turn on the radio and whatever is there is there, well, they're getting fed this sort of vacuous audio garbage. There may be a certain of level of social engineering behind it or it may be that the easiest stuff to sell is the most meaningless. Either way, there's just this mass of empty noise masquerading as music (in my opinion) and I don't want to change it. It would be nice to do it, but I'm not going to be the one to do it. I know that. I'm not in a position to do that. The way to accomplish that would be to be Sting or George Michael--to work your way right into the heart of the beast and then do something slightly radical but which is so saleable that they have to put it out because they want the money. I'm not the man to do that.

"Trying to write for other people is always impossible. You're constantly thinking, 'What do they want? What are they listening to at the moment? I should write like that.' No. Doing what you want to do is a hard barrier to get over. At some point you have to leap off the cliff. 'To hell with it. I'm going to do what I like and I hope people like it.' Especially when I want to make a career out of this. I need to earn money in order to keep doing this. I'm not in a position where I have so much money in the bank that it doesn't matter if I sell another record again. It is a bit of a risk because rather than writing what I think is commercially viable music, I'm writing what I think is artistically viable music and hoping that it will appeal to people. I've found that it works, that people have been actually happy to go out and buy it and play it and keep listening to it. Yeah, I'm quite happy just writing better music and selling less of it."

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Banco de Gaia