THE BLACK DOG has just left the stage. It's the last day of Spain's Sonar Festival – a digital music event set in Barcelona – and the international crowd of electro-lovers refuse to move, urging the Sheffield ambient dance act to do one more.

Walking down from the stage, Richard Dust looks both knackered and elated. The Black Dog has just played a stand-out set of spacious beats, experimental sounds and intermissions of rough rips.

The Black Dog is much like its myth – named so because of founding member Ken Downie's depression, the group is dark, mysterious and unpredictable. That's why the crowd refuses to leave – the stood-up equivalent of a standing ovation.

But the audience's accolade goes beyond tonight's set. The Black Dog have been pioneers of electronica since the late eighties on Sheffield's Warp Records – one of the genre's most influential labels, with releases such as intelligent dance music album Bytes.

While the line-up has changed several times over the last few years, the act continues to pave a creative path of quirky-edged musical themes and off-kilter beats. Acidic rips pierce Black Dog's ambient tracks, constantly bombarding the listener with unexpected samples.
The Black Dog's current line-up (post 2002) is Richard Dust, Martin Dust and founding member Ken Downie. Their latest album Radio Scarecrow, released on Somar Records, is a labour of love that took over two years to complete.

It's the first album to be completed in the band's Sheffield Lab studio and has bass so heavy that Black Dog were made ill recording it, having to restrict sessions to three hours.

Martin Dust says: "It's a narrative – the whole album is carefully put together and if something doesn't fit it gets taken out. We recorded 67 variations of track line-ups – the album has to be listened to in its entirety."

The narratives don't come much stranger, among them magick, electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) and sampled number stations – the means by which spies transmit information through a string of numbers introduced by coded snippets of songs. Number Stations are referred to by the samples they use.

The Atención number station was named such because it begins with the Spanish phrase 'atención' (Atención became the centre of a United States federal court espionage trial following the arrest of a WASP network of spies in Cuba in 1998).

Black Dog is fascinated with these phenomena – relaying quirky facts about the spy world and proliferation of number stations in existence today. "We're really interested in short-wave radio, number stations and EVP recordings – it just gets darker and darker – the number stations are still used by spies but as technology gets faster and bigger encryption gets more complex."

"It's fascinating and the messages could mean anything - it's quite nice that we can't explain what they mean."

Listening to number station samples is eerie; voices speaking over crackly lines read out lists of number groups with seemingly no meaning. Playing Radio Scarecrow at the same time uncannily amplifies the mystery of these cryptic messages – the perfect source of sample for an act so immersed in everything electronic.

Never has electronica been so wound up in espionage, apart from Jean Michelle Jarre, who was sampled on the Magnetic Fields number station.
The band's newest project is a 12" remix Detroit vs Sheffield, with Detroit techno master Rob Hood.

"Sheffield and Detroit are very similar politically and industrially," says Martin. "Detroit had the steel/car industry and when that went bust the city lost part of its identity. Detroit's a grey, rainy city, just like Sheffield, but despite the collapse of these industries the city was still trying to create glamour on its own terms," said Martin.
"But that doesn't mean The Black Dog is going to start wearing gold lame jackets like Heaven 17," laughs Martin, "we're not into that kind of glamour."

Since the group's Warp record days in the nineties Black Dog has moved on. Martin says the new incarnation of Black Dog "work more collaboratively."

Richard says: "Before Black Dog would work out tracks independently but now we're a collective effort." In terms of Radio Scarecrow, Martin says the sound is "much darker with more bass – Bytes captured a lot of naive optimism. We were taking influence from Detroit and New York at the time and it embodied that perfectly. But Radio Scarecrow is more confident – we didn't want to make another Bytes."

Reflecting on the Sonar weekend Richard says: "It was stunning." Martin adds: "Barcelona's an amazing city, Gaudi just wouldn't happen in Sheffield – can you imagine if he went to Sheffield City Council with a plan for the Sagrada Familia? The council would say: 'get on thee bike."

But now, back in the Harlequin pub, the act is gearing up again. This weekend it's Glastonbury.

Sheffield vs Detroit and Radio Scarecrow are available to buy online.