MATT Preston sighs and remembers his early life as a prodigy. ''I stopped the cello properly when I was about 18. I think doing classical music was more of a bargaining tool than anything. I kind of got forced into it.''

Offered a place by the Royal College Of Music as a child, with a neat sideline as a chorister (''there was one called They That Go Down To The Sea In Ships And Occupy Their Business In Deep Waters,''), he was every mother's cherub.

Yet, by 14, he had discovered punk, Joy Division and the bass guitar. Two years later he was covering The Crash and well on his way to musical disrespectability.

Ten years ago, he took a place on a sound recording course at Salford, and never got round to leaving. ''At the end of the day, you're always just playing other people's music, just being in an endless covers band.

''I just don't really get classical music. I think a lot of the people who listen to it don't really get it, they just pretend they do. You give them 10 people playing the same piece, they'd be hard pushed to tell.''

Odd, then, that Matt's debut release as Blue Light Fever is Shutdown, an eerie dancefloor symphony in four movements. It's the first fruit of 10 years in Manchester, in various stages of employment, musicianship, mild psychosis.

Electronic music, he says, is merely a means to an end, to make lairy guitar music, ''that's what I'm most into really, truth be known.''

The way things are going, he might have to make do with being known as an evil techno genius. There's a disquieting intensity about Matt, a threat of temper that - yes - can be tenuously linked to describe his dark dance.

Shutdown is an endearingly strange record, a dancefloor opus only half of which you could ever dance to. ''I'd say I'd hope that - erm, what Shutdown? Blimey, that's a difficult one that. I mean I'd dance to it, but I'd like all the bits that drop out, if I was off my head or what have you.''

Shutdown is part insane rambling about pretty girls, Beverly Hills prisons and beheadings, part malformed house. In fact, Blue Light Fever might just be the missing link between Fatboy Slim and Aphex Twin. It's certainly competent enough.

As well as conceptual? ''Nah, conceptual implies planning and knowing what's going on. I think ideas got a little bit carried away with themselves, to be honest. But I'm glad I stuck with it because people seem to like it now. But I think it kinda works, I like the sheer bloody-mindedness of it.''

Matt also claims to like ''evil music''. Please explain. ''I don't know - anything from angry to sinister, really, and back again. I was always into Psychic TV and Coil and all that. It's all death and rituals and pretty sinister stuff. Everything these days seems a bit lacking in that side of things, nothing seems really that evil.''

Is Blue Light Fever evil? ''Nah, I'd say it was a little but tongue-in-cheek evil. People say it's twisted, but I don't think so.''

Matt gazes into the distance, with melancholy in his eyes. ''But then, I dunno, because people often say I'm twisted, so I suppose, yeah.

Shutdown is out on Monday through S:alt Records.

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