"I'M trying to figure out what art on the internet is, and how to use the internet to facilitate making and consuming art without it overwhelming everything. Electronic music struggles with sheer volume — there are a lot of very, very good releases coming out week-by-week but it’s just impossible to listen to everything, let alone spend enough time with it to properly assess and digest it. So I’m trying to work out how you cut through all that rather than just feeding the garbage pile of good work that nobody notices because there’s so much other stuff drowning it out.”

The young Glasgow producer Calum MacRae, aka Lanark Artefax, is discussing a problem that causes a tightening in the chest of just about everyone involved in electronic music these days. The difference with him, though, is how remarkably successful he, and his latest record in particular, has been in avoiding that same fate. MacRae’s first EP — a relatively flinty, industrial five-tracker named Glasz — appeared last summer on the UIQ label. His just-out Whities 011 EP for Nic Tasker’s Whities imprint, however, is the one that has really caught people’s attention, and, crucially, held on to it.

Choosing Tasker’s label has certainly played a part in making the EP stick: not only is the leftfield London electronic imprint yet to release a dud record, its releases also somehow always nail the black magic of staying in the mind while those of other equally high-quality labels tumble directly into the Gmail abyss. There’s more to it than just choice of label, though — with Whities 011 MacRae has demonstrated a knack for conjuring a strong and sympathetic narrative within which his music can exist, as well as for writing an absolutely killer tune.

Touch Absence, the de-facto lead track of the four on Whities 011, first appeared in a slightly different form (the Intimidating Stillness Mix, to be precise) as a limited white-label release late last year. It immediately caught the attention for its euphoric collision of cascading, elemental percussion, celestial synth pads and brilliant use of chopped-up synthetic vocals. (“Often it seems like if you make synthetic vocals sound human it makes them more human than human ones,” he said in a recent interview with The Ransom Note, casually expressing something I’ve been thinking since the 1990s without ever quite finding the right words for).

“I don’t really make 4/4 dance music but a couple of years ago I found myself making what for me was quite a big, clubby tune. I had spoken to Nic a few times before and knew his label really well, and thought it would be a good fit for it. Alex, Whities’ designer, said the track made him think of storms and natural disasters, and of ‘youthful urgency’. So we decided the release would focus on a death-cult of young people who chase storms and try to annihilate themselves in them — not in a nihilistic way but for the joy of matter and destruction and materiality. Everything about the concept stemmed from the conviction that we didn’t want to do some formulaic, deconstructed club-music thing with pseudo-cryptic, abstract design. I think that’s all played out now, so we agreed to do something completely different, something really sincere. I had a couple of other labels offer to do pretty much the same thing but I always had the feeling that Whities was where it should be.”

So it has proved, and interest in the release has snowballed over several months since the appearance of that early white-label version. Whether through geographical confusion or force of journalistic habit, fascination about the influence Glasgow has wrought on his work is strong. Though clearly fond of a place he’s lived in for several years, MacRae sees it as a minor factor at most. “There’s some kind of mythos about Glasgow and growing up here and the effect it has that people from outside always seem really desperate to find out about,” he says. “But Glasgow is really just a city with a pretty good music scene, and that’s about it as far as I’m concerned. I don’t see my music as being tied to it at all.

“There’s a video on YouTube from the late 1990s of John Peel going to visit Aphex Twin and Luke Vibert in Cornwall, where they both come from,” he continues. “Aphex and Vibert are talking about hyper-modern electronic music, but the three of them are sitting in this ancient amphitheatre in the middle of the countryside. The fact that those guys were able to carve a really strong identity out of coming from there, rather than London or Manchester or wherever, has always really struck a chord with me. I’m definitely similar in that I see my music emanating from places like Lanark, where I’m from, and from places in the Highlands where I spent a lot of time when I was young. I see it among old buildings, rocks and grass rather than in the kind of urban setting a lot of electronic music is associated with.”

MacRae is a joy to talk to — a wonderful combination of gregarious good humour and earnest, total and completely uncynical belief in the importance of good art. The sincerity with which he talks already inhabits every element of his work just two releases into his career. “At the core of what I’m trying to do is sincerity,” he agrees, “I think our generation are by now thoroughly sick of postmodernism, and are craving things that are personal and sincere instead. For years there was so much art that was just nihilistic, meaningless crap, but I think a lot of art in this city is starting to break away from that now. A lot of electronic music is still suffering from it though, and what I want to do is go in the exact opposite direction. All of this is ultimately about working out how best to do that.”

Lanark Artefax’s Whities 011 EP is out now on Whities