I want M.A.N.D.Y.

Dancing is a form of self-expression, and a beautiful thing for it. The best dance music encourages this by giving the listener a chance to interpret, a chance to feel what they want. Fun is always connected to the experiences around it, the experiences that inform it. One of the reasons parties are such a laugh is that there are so many different individual contexts going on: everyone has their own reason for being there, for interacting, for dancing.

This is something production duo M.A.N.D.Y. (Patrick Bodmer & Philipp Jung) are intuitively aware of. Their music is a spacious form, with simple crisp beats decorated with a smattering of contrasting bleeps, drones and throbs. This is music that takes a bit of listening to get into; not in the traditional sense of multiple plays, but rather in the length of time you give it at a single hearing: it takes a while for you to find the groove. Tracks tend to be long, and rightly so. The best thing about M.A.N.D.Y.'s music, often classified (in the UK at least) as 'minimal', is that it gives the listener a great deal of scope for interpretation.

The pair who operate as M.A.N.D.Y. do so for Get Physical records, the Berlin-based outfit headline with colleagues Booka Shade and DJ T. Since 2004, all have attracted international acclaim for their productions, and currently sit at the top of booking lists for leading promoters the world over. Their music - all three acts have a comparable style - has considerable crossover appeal, with, for example, influential indie-centric review site Pitchfork giving them considerable coverage.

It's now early 2008, and the UK's Olympus of quality dance music, Fabric, have asked M.A.N.D.Y. to compile the 38th release of their signature series. It is, as many listeners will have been taking as a pre-release given, a corker. The record begins with an immanent combination of glitches and vocal fragments, whistling wind sounds, and a recorded siren reminiscent of one of those wee baggage trains you get at stations and airports: a pre-emptive reminder that unrefined music is always around us. This artistic grounding established, the compilation then properly kicks off with Yello's vaguely hilarious ('I go...') Bananas to the Beat: serious music this is, po-faced it ain't.

Hereafter there is a considerable variation in atmosphere and sound. Certain tracks bear a strong resemblance to the two-step electro releases Andrew Weatherall and Keith Tenniswood were putting out for Rotters Golf Club a few years back (a good thing), whereas others are lighter and have a disco feel to their treble melodies (less exciting, but still interesting). I managed to catch up with M.A.N.D.Y.'s Patrick Bodmer this month, between his DJ appearances over in Australia, to find out about how they successfully put together a compilation that is both challenging and highly listenable.

Now, it seems self-explanatory that challenging music is also challenging to make, and this was something I wanted to focus on in conversation. As a writer, describing dance music can be quite a challenge, because so many of the sounds and emotions that are portrayed are very hard to pinpoint in words. I began by asking Bodmer how, when M.A.N.D.Y. are in the studio, they go about communicating to each other what they'd like a song to sound like, which ideas work and which don't.

"Well, ten years ago we had our own studio, and I did a lot of productions for myself. But I never realised how difficult it would be to make club music with a number of people in the studio. It's very hard for us to describe what we want to create, what we're doing, what we're looking for. Sometimes it is about making noises, like a human beatbox; sometimes it needs someone to do it [make the sound they're after], and then we talk about it; sometimes we play reference records to describe sounds; and sometimes we use technical music language, classical music language. We have really hard conflicts, often because of misunderstandings."

As a non-musician, with little knowledge of how the nuts and bolts of a high-end techno track or compilation are put together, I find the image of these experts sitting around with their headphones on, trying to come to an agreement with limited terms of reference, fascinating (and, to be honest, mildly amusing). It commands a lot of respect, because anything that can make equal use of classical terminology and beatbox techniques to equal effect is clearly a very dynamic practice. And it must take a lot of patience.

"Yes, but there's a real band atmosphere - and that's why we enjoy it. Often we'll just sit and talk as a way of working round things: about food, about the night we played last night, girlfriend issues - and through that we get the vibe. It's more than talking about music. It's more like soul talking."

It makes perfect sense. M.A.N.D.Y. talk about personal matters unrelated to music, as a way of finding an atmosphere that suits the music they want to make. They then labour to make music that fits this atmosphere, without feeling constrained to be specific in a way that might not suit that atmosphere. Then we, the privileged listener, get to hear music that clearly has a strong human quality to it, but that doesn't force its attitudes or meaning on to us. If you've got that purity of creation and delivery, and, like M.A.N.D.Y., you can give it a sophisticated yet irresistible beat... Well hell, I'm dancing.