"It's always meeting with someone, for me," Kouhei Matsunaga observes, pondering the unusual arc of his career. First it was Japanese noise legend Merzbow, who, in the '90s, would introduce him to the European electronic avant-garde. Then, in 2002, it was New York avant-rapper Sensational who would bring Matsunaga back to beats. "I was making an event, a party in Japan at that time," Matsunaga says. "I invited Sensational. When we go to some restaurant there is folk music playing, and Sensational was dancing with the folk music and I was quite impressed. His rhythmic sense..." he tails off, his English not quite serving him.

Matsunaga is speaking via Skype from his hometown of Osaka, and it quickly becomes clear that our conversation will face obstacles greater than a wavering WiFi signal. Though Matsunaga has split his time between Osaka and Berlin for six years, his English isn't perfect. He barrels through anyway, his sunny enthusiasm never faltering. In a way his English is like his music: a gleeful patchwork of the proper and the improper, leaning on convention just enough to get by—and not a bit more.

In this case, though, Matsunaga's point is clear. After meeting Merzbow, he began to feel that the rhythmic conventions of hardcore techno and hip-hop—his childhood loves—could be stifling. But in the past decade, Matsunaga has become increasingly fascinated by the idea of working with, or through, those limitations. "I'm noise music-influenced, I think. Noise music should not have any limits to expression—but techno has a beat, so it's limited already. I want to go outside from this limitation somehow. Keep the limitation, but still go outside."

Matsunaga went on to produce perhaps his best-known work with Sensational, the 2006 LP Sensational Meets Kouhei. The album was assembled in a studio in a single day. "I brought maybe 15 tunes," Matsunaga says. "Then we made about ten tracks in 15 hours. We were very quick. He'd just keep rapping." The result was a stark but intoxicating meeting of minds. Matsunaga's instrumentals recast the low-slung heft of his '90s heroes—Wu-Tang, Kool Keith—in jarringly digital terms, their bone-dry breakbeats and abrasive synth tones sounding like the cries of a dying modem. Sensational's scrambled flow is smeared across the mix, cramped and breathless.

The ongoing collaboration (the pair are currently working on a new album) is just one of many for Matsunaga. His 2010 LP Self VA. shows the extent of his range: its 23 tracks veer from chaotic skronk-noise with Duplates & Mastering engineer Rashad Becker to bizarre electronic pop as Internet Magic with Max Turner, and more abstract sonics with veteran sound artists Ralf Wehowsky and Leif Elggren. It's easy to see how Matsunaga gets all these musicians to work with him. In conversation he is effusive and quick to erupt in giggles, while a follow up email elicits a barrage of smiley faces and friendly salutations—the sort of guileless charm that is, frankly, impossible to resist.

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It's also clear that Matsunaga thrives on the give-and-take of collaborative work. He describes its appeal in near-spiritual terms. "I have my own world and you have your own world. When we collaborate, these mix together. It's... how do you say... cosmic? It's not me and it is me. I always find a new kind of sense and a new kind of feeling from collaboration." The mystical dimension of the practice is, in fact, something he has explored more literally: 2010's 3.Telepathics Meh In-Sect Connection featured Matsunaga, Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio and Sean Booth of Autechre improvising in entirely different parts of the world, their contributions cohering, so the idea went, through thought alone.

The artists involved in that release are clear inspirations for Matsunaga in their blending of club and experimental forms. In particular, Autechre's fusion of vintage b-boy hip-hop, hardcore techno and extreme electronics bears striking parallels with Matsunaga's oeuvre.

The variety of Matsunaga's output is matched only by its quantity. In an interview with The Wire last year, he revealed that he had made 700 tracks as NHK'Koyxen since 2009. That total has now climbed to 900. He works fast, often making several tracks a day. This torrent of material is then sent to Bill Kouligas—a friend in Berlin—who has collected a tiny portion of it on a pair of albums for his label, PAN. ("Recently he said, 'Don't send me any more, it's annoying!'" Matsunaga giggles.)

The two volumes of Dance Classics contain an assortment of beat-based productions, some expanding on the mechanised hip-hop formula of Sensational Meets Kouhei, others taking a similar approach to techno. Matsunaga studied architecture at university, and you can sense an architectural mentality behind these tracks. Bright, bold and simple, they read almost like structural diagrams, blocky sketch outlines for some other form of techno. "Architecture is making space from the outside, music can make space from the inside," Matsunaga says. "That point can be related, I think. And composing and construction is kind of similar for me—the balance."

Suffused with lurid rave stabs and thunderous kick drums, the first two volumes in the series contain traces of Matsunaga's youthful love for UK hardcore—he lists labels like Suburban Base, Rising High and XL as favourites. But they also reflect a growing interest in the clean, hypnotic palette of minimal techno. Matsunaga describes the third instalment, due shortly on PAN, as a "more techno-nised, more minimal" record. It reflects Matsunaga's newfound conviction that "less expression, less melody" can somehow, in the right context, amount to more. But Matsunaga's approach to the form is, as always, smash-and-grab. Stark, rugged and often dangerously overbalanced, these tracks are unlikely to surface in a Richie Hawtin set any time soon.

The Dance Classics series is by no means Matsunaga's first foray onto the dance floor. In 2008 Raster-Noton released Unununium, an EP with his friend Toshio Munehiro. Named for Japan's national broadcaster ("I and Toshio were talking: 'which name could be most hit by Google?'"), NHK's debut outlined a playful but punishing form of techno, a gabba-like assault of hyper-distorted kicks and scouring digital noise. The response was instantaneous. "The Raster-Noton online shop sold out the EP in less than a week," Matsunaga says. "It was surprising, so many people liked it. We started to make this kind of music really for fun. I made music already but Toshio didn't. He has only guitar pedals, compact pedals. So my computer sounds went through his pedals."

The NHK sound, which was subsequently explored on an EP for Important Records and a split with SND on PAN, seems remarkably forward-thinking in 2013, with the likes of Emptyset and Pete Swanson recently exploring similar terrain. And Matsunaga's Dance Classics work appears prescient, too, its computer music/techno cross-pollinations having been expanded on by Lee Gamble and Holly Herndon.

But while his dance releases are arguably Matsunaga's most revered, and have doubtless exposed him to a broader audience than ever before, he continues to explore collaborative work across styles and disciplines. He singles out Becker—another Berlin friend—as perhaps his favourite collaborator, and enthuses about the "escaped power style" the pair have developed: a means, it seems, of shedding the constraints of critical thought. "When I'm focusing on a soundscape, I'm always thinking, 'Hmm is this good? Or maybe not...'" Matsunaga explains. "[Rashad and I] think nothing, just go with our energies. When I'm making music without thinking, without much focusing, then I find something new which is unexpected. I realized that a beautiful thing is always casually there—and those casual things are always acceptable somehow."