"This isn't easy," Gobby said over the phone. "To be interviewed. I'm really shy, but I'm getting better now."

I got the feeling our chat was a coming-out of sorts for the New York producer, who, up until recently, had maintained a mysterious and often cryptic internet presence. I first made contact with Gobby, whose real name is Gabriel, when he reached out to me with details about his new techno project called Monkeybone. Sensing that this sort of direct connection was rare, I asked him for an interview. I wasn't sure what to expect when I called him. He was quiet and reserved, but also poised. He's the kind of person who prefers silence over "ums" and "ahs" when he's trying to find the right words.

Gobby's music isn't so considered. After barging onto the techno scene with the excellent New Hat 12-inch in 2012, he went down a rabbit hole of free releases based on increasingly weird and unhinged electronics, from simple loops to dizzying collages, with obtuse artwork and song titles that made everything difficult to pick apart. His releases are hard to listen to as often as they're brilliant. Sometimes they're both at the same time. His intermittent stream of free releases gives the impression of an inspired, if restless artist who doesn't focus on one thing for too long.

But that might be starting to change. When Gobby first emailed me about Monkeybone, he called the new project a place for techno. All the same, the first Monkeybone release (a concept EP of sorts about a bad roommate) is hardly a straight-up interpretation of the sound, throwing trippy minimal, surging melodic house and God knows what else into a blender and pouring out the gritty mixture into meandering tracks. It's one of the best things he's released in a while, and when you consider his rap-oriented Beats By Gobby tape and his poppy SETH project—with a tape out on 1080p soon—it seems like he's figuring out how to focus his creativity just a little bit more.

I began by asking about Gobby's background. At first he refused to answer, but I was able to glean a few details. He's actually a trained musician, which came as a surprise for someone whose music seems so defiantly amateurish. Gobby's earliest memories of music go back to his time in church, and in high school he learned to play the piano, trumpet and drums. He got into electronic music the way a lot of people his age did: by dicking around on Limewire. He downloaded music almost at random, making CDs out of what he found. Kid Koala, Wagon Christ and Aphex Twin were some of the earliest artists he remembers liking. He later got into Merzbow and hip-hop guys like Madlib and J Dilla, producers whose scattershot and sometimes abrasive approach to music seems like an influence on Gobby. A few years later, he got a copy of FruityLoops.

"I didn't even know how to sample anything until, like, a year and half in," he said. "It just didn't occur to me until one day I clicked a box that said 'import file.' I would just spend all day writing this goofy shit. I have an hour of it still saved but most of it's gone. It's hilarious. I want to share it at some point. To me, it's really funny—a bunch of dinky tinkering, really ADD, clicking around a lot on the family computer."

Gobby moved to New York but details of that period are hazy—he doesn't like talking about them—but eventually he met Daniel Fisher, AKA Physical Therapy, who introduced him to Charles Damga from Warp Records. Damga runs the label UNO NYC, and Gobby, who was then working as ZoneWerx (material from which UNO is hoping to release soon), captured his imagination with a wealth of unconventional material. "The first time he came over, he gave me something like four days' worth of music," Damga told me via email. "He's just so fresh and in his own place. There are parts of Madlib about his beats, dark and gritty, but at the same time Clams Casino-like with euphoric melodies. It's YouTube samples and internet based, 'of the times,' but also really old and analogue, filtered and coughed up. His techno embodies those qualities and he never really abandons his core despite whatever genre may come through his fingers. He's the ultimate punk core of UNO's flexibility and ethos, plus he's an amazing drummer—one of his many real-world skills I admire, keeping him from 'just some FruityLoops' guy or whatever."

New Hat was a precocious first release. Though it was one of the more straight-ahead dance releases on UNO at that point it was hardly normal, full of rubbery sounds and elastic rhythms. The EP framed Gobby as part of New York's dance music underground, a world that didn't entirely fit a producer who had reams of weird stuff floating around the internet. "That was the first time a lot of people had heard me," Gobby said. "I didn't really get into that kind of techno until that late. I wasn't into it, or a lot of stuff just didn't catch my ear until much later. A lot of people think I'm a techno guy, but that's not the first thing I started doing. I wouldn't call anything I do specifically techno, but I don't blame anyone if [New Hat] was the first thing they heard."

From there, Gobby released Fashion Lady, his self-proclaimed "Techno Ass Album," and one of the finest things to his name yet. It was a collection of rough-around-the-edges dance tracks that had the mark of a brilliant amateur. Fashion Lady also introduced the noisy, alienating and often confusing side of Gobby that would appear in some of his later works. "The weird stuff was already there," he said, "it was just how I was showing people. You can't invite people in—a large amount of people—with the weird stuff and then show them this poppier stuff. Well... I could, but I don't know how that would have turned out. But I wanted to say, 'Here's some stuff to enjoy but there's also this, if you're interested.' I don't do just one kind of music."

"I feel like the only difficulty is making sure people don't hold one sound against him," Damga said, "to keep hungry music minds whetted while still moving across a few sounds, projects and his artwork as well as musical output. Very few balance those lines well. Nowadays everyone wants to hold your 'one trick' against you until you're in a corner doing it over and over, then discard you if you alter it, or when the gag runs dry."

The releases that followed Fashion Lady were confounding: Above Ground, Wakng Thrst For Seeping Banhee and the Mixtape From The Du Series were all defined by a wandering ear and a blatant disregard for consistency or sound quality. New tracks would bleed in over old ones. Songs would be subsumed by static or simply be chewed up into nothingness. In a phrase, it was fucked up.

"I don't know why it sounds fucked up," Gobby said, sounding flummoxed at the suggestion. "Maybe it's because I have tinnitus 24/7, maybe I get annoyed with sound, I don't know. My ears are pretty fucked. I'm not sure if I really hear it the same way other people do. I have no high frequencies in my ears, so I can't hear a lot of the high, resonant distortion that other people are hearing. Maybe other people clean it up and make a cleaner sound? But I don't. Because I can't hear that. I can't compare it to someone with better ears."

The lo-fi aesthetic and all-over-the place songwriting are both part of the Gobby mystique. It goes with his seemingly random release schedule and humourous track titles, all of which feel like the result of shyness rather than a desire to be mysterious. "I was a little afraid of having to talk to people at first," he admitted. "I wasn't ready for it, to be out there on the internet. I don't think I was responsible enough. I could be a little insensitive, and I probably would have ended up saying stuff or just looking stupid.

"I'd like the humour to not be the focus," he said. "Humour has a lot to do with my music... It's really important to me. I think maybe I had to get it out of my system... I would get caught in a humour loophole, and all of a sudden have this complete joke of a track. Sometimes the more serious things would start as a joke, something that would stick out in my head, and then it would become kind of serious. I thought people could discern between the two when I was doing it, even in the releases when I would flip back and forth... Do people not take me seriously?" He paused, sounding legitimately concerned about how he might be coming off.

Gobby

Gobby's music feels more focused these days. Late last year he dropped the lengthy Beats By Gobby for free, a journey through boom-bap instrumentals in the grand tradition of the hip-hop beat tape. It was inspired by his earliest memories of rap music, when he couldn't follow along with the lyrics and would focus on the instrumentals. The beats were originally meant for rappers to use, though they never found a home. Beats By Gobby is (mostly) so smooth and melodic that it doesn't sound like him. It reveals that beneath all the mischievous noise and experimentation, there's a craftsman with a good ear for hooks.

Gobby's other big project is SETH, a collaboration with vocalist and songwriter Jamie Krasner that comes as close to pop as Gobby has been. On 2013's self-titled release for UNO, they mixed sweet vocals with sonic weirdness (like on the alluring "Fish Oil"). The new 1080p tape, This Is True (Sunseth), is even more eccentric, melting Krasner and Gobby into one swirly mess.

Fed up with how he saw the media portraying SETH as a svengali project with Gobby calling all the shots, he recently took to Facebook with an angry statement clarifying that it's an equal partnership. It was an uncharacteristic move. The Facebook account is relatively new, and is an attempt to assert more control over narratives in the media that he felt were getting away from him. (He's since used it to post photos, streams of his music and his own comic books.)

Talking to Gobby about all this, I get the feeling that he's taking things more seriously now, from the way he thinks and talks about his music, to the way he distributes it. It doesn't mean that any of it is becoming more straight-laced—the latest SETH and Monkeybone releases are anything but—but he's changing his approach, moving away from free giveaways towards a more professional model. It's as if he's acknowledging that his musical projects might be something more than fooling around.

"I used to make a CD, play a show and pass it out," he said. "And I guess I didn't really want to change that—I wanted it to be people who were in the same position as me, who didn't have any money. I didn't think about it. I just felt like sharing, and I wanted people to enjoy it. I liked giving a lot. But that's over."