Like many DJs and producers, Joe Baker, the artist better known as Forest Drive West, obsessively digs for new music. Unlike many, he does this mostly while riding his bike. "Part of the reason I like Bandcamp is literally because I can do it on my phone while I'm biking," he said. "You've got a feed of what the people you follow have bought, and it will just go through those tracks. So I've got it in my pocket, and if one comes along that I like, I press like, and if not I just skip it."

He explained this from a perch in The Black Lion, a self-described "rustic-style local pub favouring TV sport" near his home in Plaistow, East London. "I'm actually really lucky," he said. "My ride to work is all off-road, there's a path that goes from my house all the way along a canal, so I get in the zone, listen to new music." The ride is about 40 minutes each way. "That's a bit of time I have every day to discover new music, which I'm kind of obsessed with doing."

It's always hard to know what to expect meeting an artist for the first time, but with Baker it was literally impossible. At the time of our interview, there was no information about him available—just the cryptic name, Forest Drive West, and his music, a rapidly growing catalog of jungle and atmospheric techno, released on labels like Livity Sound, Hidden Hawaii and Rupture London. Deepening the mystery was the fact that, whoever this artist was, he seemed to arrive as a fully-formed talent, as well-versed in house and techno as he was in the realm of advanced beat science, dabbling in Euclidean rhythms and unusual time signatures (the B-side of his Hidden Hawaii record is in 5/4, much to the chagrin of anyone who's played it out unawares).

Who was he? Not, it turns out, some shadowy mad scientist of a producer, or a known artist working under a pseudonym (as some people, including me, had wondered), but a soft-spoken teacher of computer sciences with a quietly fierce work ethic, who over nearly two decades has produced hundreds of tracks, one after another, none of which met his personal standard of quality until recently.

"To be honest, this mysterious Forest Drive West thing is a bit of an accident," he said. "It's not something I set out to do. But I don't want to spend my time doing social media. The time that I do have, I want to be making music. If I've got free time, that's what I'm doing. Making music, mixing records."

Baker's life demands this kind of economy. He works full-time teaching teenagers about computers, and has a baby at home. Music is relegated to the odd snatches of time those responsibilities leave open. Finding new tracks is one thing—he's got his bike rides for that, and can sneak in the occasional Discogs and YouTube wormhole at home. Making music is another. Some artists treat production as a full-time job, dedicating 30 hours or more to the studio each week. Baker is lucky to squeeze in an hour per day, maybe two on the weekend. Luckily, he works fast.

"In a couple hours, I can probably get a track down," he said. "Arrange something as quick as I possibly can. Get a vibe going, get to the six-minute point of a rough skeletal track. I'm not just doing 16 bar loops and leaving them on my computer. Every time I start something, I try and arrange it. I've got really quick at doing that now."

That's true of his techno tracks, anyway. Jungle takes a bit more work. Techno, he says, is "more about creating a vibe, leave it rolling constantly and tweaking stuff. Making jungle is more stop and start, changing little bits, lots of going back from the beginning of the track, going through and hearing where an edit needs to be made. So yeah, it's a different state of mind."

He sipped his beer and thought about it. "I used to spend a lot of time getting a drum break, and then programming that into a pattern that I liked, and backing it up with heavy kicks and snares. But now I've got to the point where I can generally process something to make it sound right just from using one break, or setting up an effects bus with distortion and compression. From years of doing that I've got much quicker at making them sound right."

That learning process began around the turn of the millennium, when Baker started messing around with Music 2000 for Playstation, then Fruity Loops and Acid Pro. As teenagers, he and his friends would go to jungle and drum & bass nights in Brighton, then come home and try to recreate what they'd heard. Making music became a day-to-day habit for Baker, but a solitary one, aimed more at his own personal satisfaction than any goal of making it as an artist.

"Part of it is wanting to play my own stuff and see people dance to it and hear it sound really good on a rig," he said. "But also, I just really enjoy the whole puzzle of trying to put something together. Getting really frustrated, finishing something, feeling incredibly rewarded. I've done it for so long that it just feels like something I've always done and that I always will."

Baker DJ'd a lot over the years as well—"mostly room two, playing to no one"—and those experiences formed the litmus test for his own music. "I didn't want to send anything to anyone until I was comfortable playing it myself in a DJ set. And it's taken me a very long time to get to that point."

This finally happened sometime around 2016. Baker played some of his own tracks out, and thought they "sounded OK." He planned to release them himself on his own label, which he'd call Forest Drive West—the original intention for that name. But then a spur of the moment decision took things in an unexpected direction.

"My friends did a night called Colony," he said. "Pev was playing, and I just thought, 'Fuck it, I'm gonna burn some stuff on a CD.' I went up to him on the night. I'd been a big fan of his for years and years. We had kind of an awkward fanboy moment, I gave him this CD and assumed I'd never hear from him again. He got back to me a couple weeks later."

Around the same time, Baker connected with another one of his influences: Rupture, a jungle and drum & bass party whose record label is easily one of the best sources for those sounds right now. Rupture had inspired Baker for years—one of the tracks he sent them was something he'd recorded eight years earlier and shown to a friend while they rode the train from Brighton to London for one of Rupture's quarterly parties. His transition from fan to family member was as swift with Rupture as it had been with Livity Sound. "I had some jungle stuff, they were into it," he said. Jungle Crack, which followed his Livity Sound debut by a few months, showed a stunning command of sound design and complex rhythms. It remains one of Rupture London's most sought after releases.

We finished our beers and walked the 15 minutes or so to Baker's house. Inside, his partner smiled at us from her spot on the floor, where she was playing with their eight-month old baby. "Now you get a glimpse of my rock and roll lifestyle," Baker quipped. He crossed a carpet strewn with toys, crouched down and flipped through his records, settling on one by Dr Orlando Owoh. He'd been on an African highlife tip lately. "15, 20-minute tracks with big percussion jams in the middle," he explained. "Wicked grooves, really interesting rhythms. Been buying a lot of stuff like that. For home listening, but I sample it as well."

Up two narrow flights of stairs was Baker's studio, an attic room only modestly disheveled, with room for two people to sit facing the large monitor at the center of his work station. "It gets very hot in here in the summer," he assured me as he scrolled through hundreds of files on his hard drive, all of them his own productions. At that moment he had a lot of stuff about to come out: his album on Livity Sound, a techno EP on Neighbourhood, a collaboration with the Hidden Hawaii artists Felix K and DB1 on the Warp sub-label Arcola, and a deep house EP from Moniker, his duo with his friend Tim Gee.

Baker showed me a Reaktor sequencer he'd developed for his live show that uses Euclidean rhythms—a fascination he shares with other artists on Hidden Hawaii, especially DB1. "I'm terrible at explaining it," he said. "It allows you to choose the number of potential hits in a cycle, and then the number of actual hits that you have. So say you had seven potential hits in a cycle, and then you say there's gonna be four equally spaced notes in that. But you could increase the size to like 30 potential hits. And you have these rhythms cycling around, and they just evolve into more complex beats."

He opened the sequencer and got it going. The rhythms played out on interfaces that looked like clocks, with a central arm circling around a ring of dots that lit with each hit. Watching it, I could almost grasp the elusive concept of the Euclidean rhythm. Baker, meanwhile, had forgotten about me for the moment, his eyes trained on the sequencer's blinking interface as he tweaked and manipulated its spiraling rhythms. He was used to working in "small windows of opportunity," and this was one of them—home from work, his baby occupied, a few minutes before dinner. Seeing him in the groove, it seemed clear that, whatever opportunities may lie ahead for Baker, this is all he really needs.

"I feel really lucky that I've been able to put out records on labels I like and that I was buying stuff from before," he said. "It's great that it's opened up so many possibilities—traveling, collaboration, meeting likeminded people." He fiddled with the sequencer a bit. "But if that hadn't happened I'd still be making tunes."