"Hi, good to meet you. I'm Ryan."

"Yeah, obviously."

"I think today should be great."

"It will be if you ask me some interesting questions. If not, it's going to be shit."

I first met Russell Haswell on a bright afternoon in October 2014, in the main square of Kraków, Poland. We were scheduled to talk in front of an audience for a live edition of RA's Exchange at that year's Unsound festival. Haswell was running a little late, and he was in a bad mood. Oscar Powell, who'd recently released an album from Haswell on his label, Diagonal, mentioned something about an incident at their hotel. Once we were inside the Goethe-Institut, Haswell seemed to perk up at the sight of the audience. He cracked a joke, and took his seat.

"I'm not going to hold it," he said, gesturing towards the microphone. A card on the table in front of him had a synopsis of the talk printed on it: "Russell Haswell is a multidisciplinary artist known primarily for his music, including a series of albums for Editions Mego and collaborations with the likes of Aphex Twin, Pan Sonic, White House Yasunao Tone, Masami Akita and Florian Hecker."

"'White House' should be one word," he said.

Haswell told the audience that he has mixed emotions about playing festivals. He mostly doesn't see himself in the same light as the artists he's booked alongside, but this tension stirs his creativity. "I have issues going to festivals because I don't like 99% of the artists who are there," he explained. "My work is based on attacking their work, and their adhesion to genre and style and fashion. I'm anti all of these things. I'm only interested in the advancement and development and critique of what already exists."

Later that night, Haswell took the stage at Hotel Forum for a live set based on 37 Minute Workout, the record he'd released earlier that year on Diagonal. The album was notable for its use of beats, something Haswell had been resisting for years. In the past, friends and former collaborators of his like Aphex Twin and Autechre had apparently told him to "just stick a fucking beat on it, Russ," but 37 Minute Workout was the first time he'd properly done so. (He agreed to the project on the condition that Powell got him a drum machine.) On the record, beats were used less to mark rhythm and more to create chaos—one of Haswell's favourite words. His set was even further from the techno deconstructions the album was supposedly based on; by its climax, sheets of distortion rained down on the room. Haswell, periodically swearing at the crowd, faked the end of his set a few times, a sort of twisted encore, before retaking the stage and emitting a belligerent belch of noise from his machines.

When it comes to music, Haswell believes in spontaneity, provocation, emotional expressions and a loss of control. 37 Minute Workout, for example, took him two hours to make. Using a simple modular rig, he created a scenario where the record "made itself," which is a blunt way of saying that he worked out what the modules might produce and then influenced the results. "I like to straddle the illusion of producing something that somebody doesn't know whether it took five minutes or five years," he said. Another key ingredient is a feeling. "Some records may be aspirational, some of them are about longing and hoping, and wishing and dreaming," he later told me. "Projecting into the future, but often they're about the here and now."

If, in simple terms, artistic expressions are an attempt to translate something of one's self into a chosen medium, then Haswell has been achieving this aim spectacularly for 20 years. He is straight-talking, bloody-minded and sometimes salty—he's also smart, funny, culturally engaged and happy to share the knowledge he's amassed over his long career. He's lived in the UK, the US, Japan, Sweden and Finland, and although he's most readily associated with sound, he's worked extensively in visual arts and curation, which helps explain why he's as comfortable performing in a pub as he is in an art gallery. Whatever he's doing or wherever he's performing—and whether he's pleasing people or pissing them off—Haswell's art feels as close to a direct extension of himself as it's possible to get.

Haswell grew up in the '80s in Coventry, a gritty and grey city in the middle of England that's known for its automotive industry and brutalist architecture. He studied fine art at Coventry School Of Art, and got part of his musical education in local clubs and concert spaces. To illustrate the roots of his diverse influences, he likes to explain a typical night for him in the late '80s. He'd start the evening in Birmingham, seeing metal bands at Edwards Number Eight, a respected rock venue, and then take the last train back to Coventry, where he'd end up at Eclipse, one of the first UK clubs with an all-night licence. (As Haswell explained at Unsound, he'd stay completely sober back then and just soak everything in.) The club booked early UK dance figures like Carl Cox, LFO, Forgemasters and A Guy Called Gerald; Haswell always much preferred the live acts to the DJs (which is still the case), and he was drawn to the ritualistic experience of going to clubs. In Haswell's mind, he "could combine the speed, the thrash, the extreme of metal with club culture."

He eventually left Coventry for London and became immersed in the city's art scene. Haswell, who was unemployed at the time, would attend as many exhibition openings as possible, drinking the free beer and getting to know people in the scene. He became friends with artists like Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, and did work for Gilbert & George. By the mid-'90s, he was exhibiting art works—a poster from '96 for an exhibition called Some Drawings: From London, co-curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, shows Haswell's name next to Damian Hirst's. In a 2010 interview with Vice, he talked about his cockroach painting, one of his more talked-about works.

"I was quite cynical, and it just seemed like an interesting idea to use cockroaches, as they can survive in any kind of environment, whether it's a nuclear-bombed area or whatever. The idea that you could kill them with Chanel nail varnish was this strange contradiction. And there was also the fact that I'd have to go through this physical, structural, materialist process of actually killing these things myself, which was more gruesome than I ever expected. They tried to escape the whole time."

In the late '90s, Haswell was headhunted by Alanna Heiss, the then director of PS1, which was about to merge with MoMA, and he moved to New York to be a curator. The compromises that came with the job became profoundly frustrating, and he hated working with artists he didn't believe in. "If my heart isn't in something I just want to get out of it," he said. "If I feel somebody is using me, I want to get out of it. If I feel somebody is just taking the piss, I want to get out of it." The depression this caused eventually led to him leaving the US.

"I have my own emotional problems, and I get hurt like anyone else," he said. "I had a hard upbringing, you know, I've had a lot of confrontation from people for what I do. Generally I'm a lot cheerier nowadays, but usually these depressions come from frustrations. My depression comes from people's inability to communicate with me. Sometimes from loneliness. I'm not that lonely, I've got loads of friends and I'm quite sociable. But if I am lonely, if I do spend too much time on my own, I can dig myself into a hole."

Arriving back in the UK from New York, Haswell decided he was done with the country, and managed to secure an international artist's residence in Stockholm, where he spent a year. Around this time, he decided to refocus on his own works and released his first album, Live Salvage 1997→2000, a collection of gig recordings from across the globe. The album, which received the Prix Ars Electronica's Honourable Mention for Digital Music, helped establish Haswell as a key figure in extreme electronic music and sound art. In one particularly affecting piece, recorded at the Klangturm tower in St Pölten, Austria, Haswell moved in sections, scattering static across the sound field, producing what sounds like a star collapsing, and then settling into a gradually unspooling bit that evokes lava flow. The session culminated in scalpel-sharp bursts of noise. My personal listening experience with this piece oscillates between a straightforward physical rejection—please turn this off—and a deeply satisfying meditation on my relationship with sound itself.

"The gigs that were documented on the first Live Salvage were done using other people's laptops," Haswell told RBMA last year. "It was all on borrowed equipment and it all had to be improvised. It had to be worked out on the day." This sort of haphazard, off-the-cuff approach has been a constant for Haswell. In the same piece, he explained how Satanstornade, a wild four-track collaboration with Masami Akita that came out on Warp in 2002, was all improvised and recorded in the same amount of time it appears on the CD; the process was in part dictated by the gear he could get his hands on. The story behind 2014's Electroacoustic Sludge Dither Transformation Smear Grind Decomposition nO!se File Exchange Mega Edit, a double-CD collaboration with the Japanese noise artist Pain Jerk, straddles ten years, a remote exchange of ideas and the editing of five hours' worth of material.

One of Haswell's most famous collaborations was with the Austrian artist Florian Hecker. The pair were given access to the UPIC, a graphical input system (a user draws waveforms and compositions onto a tablet) devised by the late avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis. The sessions led to two albums, Blackest Ever Black and Kanal GENDYN , an EP, UPIC Warp Tracks, and a series of live shows that were bathed in lasers and utilised surround sound.

Haswell is also credited with helping revive the career of Peter Zinovieff, who was the founder of EMS, the company behind the legendary VCS3 synthesizer, a favourite of Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin and David Bowie. As a curator for Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna, in 2010 Haswell commissioned Zinovieff (by finding his address and knocking on his door) to compose a piece for a project called The Morning Line, a pavilion that had five surround sound zones. Zinovieff later described the project as the starting place for a new career as a composer, after years spent away from electronic music.

These projects—cross-discipline, conceptual, sometimes academic—are one side of the creative coin for Haswell. The thrill, uncertainty and immediacy of performing live in a music venue is also what drives him. In an ideal scenario, his sets will provoke, challenge and divide an audience. "I think it's good that some people don't like what you're doing, and I think it's great when you get a split audience," said. "Because then it turns into a debate. If everyone thinks you're fucking brilliant, it just fades out and the next thing comes. If they all think you're shit, it all fades out and you disappear again. But if you get a kind of 50/50 scenario going on, the dialogue starts and it seems to keep it alive for a lot longer than just everyone thinking it's great really."

Haswell mentioned his performance at 2015's Sonar festival as a particularly rewarding recent gig. "It came really naturally. I think it helped that I was a little bit inebriated, I had my champagne supplied, I was drinking it during the gig, I had people chanting, "Cov! Cov! Cov!" before I went on the stage. I had a guy, who I think was on acid, who kept climbing the stage, and tried to nick my champagne while I was playing. All these things really inspired me. A bit of heckling goes a long way with me. If it's a dumbstruck, quiet audience I kind of invert. I almost can't function; I don't know what to do!"

Late last year I saw Haswell play two such gigs at the Victoria pub in East London, although the audience's mousiness didn't disrupt his flow. There was something perverse about seeing him on a Sunday evening in the backroom of a pub, and on both occasions the simplicity of the setup—a very dark room and a soundsystem—placed the audience's attention squarely on the sounds. Haswell's performances, untethered to any traditional notions of musicality, deal only in what's immediate and visceral, and pose a very simple question: "Is this racket moving me?" For me, most of the time, the answer is yes; the response of people I'm with is usually split in the way Haswell aims for. It's rare anyone sits on the fence.

These gigs were part of a series called Different Circles, which was organised by the experimental grime artists Mumdance and Logos. Since he moved back to London last year from rural Suffolk, Haswell has been part of a loose community connected to the events. Ten to 15 years his junior, some of the artists seem to see Haswell as a sort of mentor figure, something that's especially true for Powell. "Russell is an amazing human being, and I could bang on about it forever," he told me last year. "But ultimately, he's an artist, and he believes in his art. Before meeting him, I wasn't really exposed to that kind of raw, all encompassing mentality that he has, where he wakes up every day and his entire being is an expression of what he is as an artist."

"He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of music and sound," Mumdance told me over email. "Over the past year and a half, especially around the Different Circles events, we've spent many evenings staying up till the crack of dawn listening to and discussing all sorts of weird music, which has definitely had a big influence on me as an artist and the way I think about sound in general."

Diagonal, which Powell runs with Jamie Williams, is now one of Haswell's main labels. They released his most recent album, As Sure As Night Follows Day, which Haswell described to me as a regression. "Because I'm getting older and I'm starting to feel old, I'm trying to make myself feel like I'm 16 again," he said. "So as a consequence, I'm looking back at the music from my youth, from my teenage years and into my early 20s. So it's a kind of amalgam of techno from the early '90s with noise, and influences from grindcore and death metal and all those kinds of things that we know I'm interested in."

"The easiest way to give yourself a headache," TechJ88 commented on Ian Maleney's RA review. "Torture room on repeat music forsure."

As Sure As Night Follows Day is an extreme record by anyone's standards. It has a ferocity that transcends most of the early '90s techno Haswell is referencing, and it was composed across a few days in a blur of improvisation. But, as Haswell said himself, it's possibly the "least radical" record he's written. If you squinted, there are tracks, such as "Gas Attack" and "Hardwax Flashback," you could imagine techno DJs playing. A remix EP that featured Autechre, Powell and DJ Stringray made these links clearer. This isn't entirely new ground for Haswell. Following a so-shambolic-it-was-great live show at Corsica Studios in 2012, he released an EP on PAN with Regis as Concrete Fence, a record in which menacing sound design was subdued by measured, club-ready drums. Haswell keeps clubbing and club music at arm's length, but he enjoys coming close enough to challenge its conventions.

This latest record was written using a modular setup, Haswell's preferred way of working these days. For years he was known as an ardent laptop performer who pushed the outer reaches of digital sound, but he's now fallen under the spell of modular. After our interview in London last year, he talked enviously about the setup that his mate Richard D. James is working with, and he told me about the Euro Rack synth module he's designed in collaboration with ALM called HASWELL'S TAIKO. It's a drum module, scheduled for release in the next couple weeks, that features 30 hand-drawn waveforms, and, as you might expect, it sounds gnarly. This year Haswell is also following up the 2014-released Conceptual nO!se LP for the Polish label Bocian, and it's likely he'll be playing live with the group Consumer Electronics, as he produced Dollhouse Songs, their latest album, which came out at the end of last year. It's also likely he'll be churning through a bunch of different projects he hasn't figured out yet.

20 years into his "non-career," Haswell is beginning to think pragmatically about his place in the world. "I'm probably at a sort of limit of success for the kind of stuff I do," he said. "I mean, I hope it's going to get better, because I wanna survive and I wanna keep doing it. I don't wanna do anything else. I'm kind of beyond employment now, where I don't know who'd have me. I mean, they probably wouldn't even let me stack shelves in Tesco."

But after all of this time there is no lack of clarity over who he is and what fuels his work. As he told me at Unsound: "I'm a voyeur, I'm a pervert, and that's where my interests are: in excess and consumption, extremity and nihilism—all of the exciting things in life."