No wonder Nick Douwma sounds tired when he speaks to The Guide. The dubstep, techno and drum and bass producer was up before dawn to be on the BBC Radio 1 breakfast show with Nick Grimshaw for the Nixtape. Douwma, aka Sub Focus, broke with the norm by mixing live and weaved listener requests from Stardust to Shaggy into each other on air.

Other DJs might not like the pressure, but Douwma calls it fun.

“You do get asked to do madly incongruous mixes by listeners but I obviously tried to select tracks from the more credible end of the scale. I chose to get rid of JLo and play Stardust.” Grimshaw’s feature dovetails with his aim to make a DJ’s work transparent.

With his second album, Torus, due on Monday, he’s upped the technology at his live shows. Everything is “audio reactive”. “When I play keys or drum pads you can see flashes of light,” he explains. “It stems from the criticism of electronic live shows which is normally that there is not enough feeling of them being live. “People accuse us of sitting back and not doing anything. I wanted to show people more obviously the things I am doing.”

Douwma, who picks out Disclosure’s live show and Beardyman’s live sampling as other examples of electronic artists bringing something extra to the stage, also uses motion sensors and infra-red technology housed in custom-made boxes.

They work in the same way as a theremin, and allow Douwma to control sounds via hand movements; he can bend the pitch to change a note, or use the boxes to change the volume or alter the tone.

“It came out of thinking of interesting ways to perform electronic music. I didn’t want to use a live band – I wanted to do something more true to the craft of making genuine electronic music.”

Douwma played in school bands in his teens, but when he heard the Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk and The Prodigy he began to experiment with production and using music software to write music. Fuelled by a love of the underground sounds he’d heard at legendary venues such as Bagleys in King’s Cross, London – jungle, breakbeat, drum and bass – he started to make dance music.

Things took off and he dropped out of a sound engineering course at London Metropolitan University to sign to drum and bass godfather Andy C’s Ram Records. Not long after (back in 2005), a remix of The Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up gave his profile another boost.

“I’d been doing it for fun but after that it became something I turned into a job.”

Four years on, his self-titled debut arrived; a year later he headlined Glastonbury’s Glade stage, supported the stadium-filling Aussies Pendulum and produced Example’s hit Kickstarts.

All fit with his current aim to mix underground music with mass appeal, which he has furthered thanks to a line of collaborators – Alex Clare, Kele Okereke from Bloc Party, Alpines, Foxes – for Torus. “I’m a fan of indie-electronic groups and that is a thread of some of the album. I like the fusion of synths with an indie feel, and I’m a big fan of Friendly Fires and Empire Of The Sun. It is one of the styles I’m referencing.”

There is dubstep, house, electro, 80s rave, 90s jungle, future garage, techno, as well as drum and bass. Another indie singer, Alice Gold, sings on the top-ten single Endorphins and UK dance chart top-five Out Of The Blue. While 18-year-old wonderkid MNEK sings on Close.

“He is a technically amazing singer. He co-wrote Duke Dumont’s Need U (100%) record, which is a great dance track. It was really cool because we wrote so quickly. When it comes so naturally it means a tune is good.

“I was playing him this basic house idea and jamming these chords and he sat down and started writing on a bit of paper, adding more layers to the song, and by the time I had finished creating a breakdown around these chords he was ready to start recording. “I hit record and he started singing into the microphone next to me – an hour later we had this completed song. “When a singer like that writes in the studio next to you it is really cool, and it is mad how quick the process is when you are on form in terms of the way a singer works – it is great to see that.”

Adding layers

The reason Douwma asked all these singers to join him for Torus was to bring the human element to his music and to have more “songs”. “I had gotten good at making dance instrumentals – very underground music and club music. I had a good response to the last record, but it was a harsh record, designed for clubs.

“For Torus I wanted to make something that was a listening experience start to finish, with moments of clubby sounds, then moments of quieter ambience, slower and with more variation.”

The opener, Torus, is purposefully fuzzy and distorted. The final track, Until The End, has that “end-of-a-film” feeling.

“I’m always thinking about how music fits together and it comes from DJing where you are programming different sets all the time – of both yours and other people’s music – and whether something feels like the start of a set, or the middle or the bridge, or a good ending.” As well as mainstream sets at Snowbombing, V Festival and Coachella, he’s had a residency at Cocoon at Amnesia in Ibiza, which still inspires his music.

“When I’m making tracks I do think where I am going to play them: I used to go to Cocoon as a punter and got a lot of ideas for songs. Timewarp was inspired by trips there, and was one of the tracks that I wrote with the idea of playing it there.”

The DJ sets are one reason he’s only released two full-length records in eight years. The late nights and number of dates, often playing three different shows in one night, means he doesn’t have a structured schedule. He writes in the dead of night, in isolation, and because he produces and mixes everything, recording is a long process.

“I tour so much that when I come back home I gravitate to weird night times and go to bed at seven in the morning,” he explains. “I’m out of sync with the rest of the world.”