EDINBURGH producer Neil Landstrumm is one of the most affable and laid-back guys you could ever hope to meet. So when he repeatedly uses the word “insulting” to describe a recent development, you know something genuinely untoward has happened. He’s talking about the 25th anniversary celebrations held by legendary Berlin club and label Tresor, for whom he, along with a clutch of other UK producers including Cristian Vogel, Dave Tarrida, Si Begg, Tobias Schmidt and Subhead, was a key player in the late 1990s. The four-day Tresor 25 blowout in the German capital featured an array of techno producers from various eras, but conspicuously omitted en masse Landstrumm and his fellow UK producers, whose sound represented a bleepy, wonky departure for the label at the time.

“Tresor have been very good to me over the years,” he begins, “but for all of us to have been ignored for the Tresor 25 thing was creatively insulting, to be honest. We sold so many records for them (Landstrumm’s 1997 LP Bedrooms And Cities, for instance, moved 14,000 units alone), and we were a completely integral part of the label for several years. I represented the Tresor brand in New York when I lived there and took it to places like Buenos Aires and Santiago, and Dave Tarrida did the same thing in Tokyo. So it’s very, very strange to find us all being left out like this.”

That one of the world’s great techno labels should wish to whitewash a critically acclaimed five-year stretch of its own history seems perverse in the extreme. Landstrumm is clear on the reasons for it happening, however. “Tresor has an archive of some of the greatest techno records ever released – Jeff Mills, UR and the like were absolutely colossal – but they’ve completely mismanaged their legacy. Recently they’ve defaulted to this very safe, tired, Detroit-based ‘origins of techno’ image that’s very saleable but is also incredibly boring and formulaic. It’s disappointing really, they should be celebrating the whole 25 years rather than just a segment of it.”

Landstrumm’s happy nature even manages to shine through as he recounts this sorry tale. Despite his uncompromising language, it’s all delivered with a tone of incredulity rather than bitterness - unsurprising when you consider the overwhelming success of a 20-year run that has also taken in an equally fruitful parallel career as a graphic designer.

“I had to rewrite my artist biog recently, which is such a horrendous thing to have to do as a Scottish person, to big yourself up like that,” he laughs. “Anyway, I was having to write about all the things I’ve done - living in New York in the 1990s, being a creative director for MTV in its heyday, doing the same for Rockstar Games and everything else, and I suddenly realised it sounded a bit like I was making it all up. It’s been quite a journey, but I think it’s important only to make music when you actually have ideas in your head, rather than churning stuff out to pay the mortgage. So having other pursuits has always been very important to me.”

Landstrumm’s music career has found him associated with a multitude of different scenes, but he’s been canny enough to keep his ties with any one movement loose. “I’ve always tried to stay on the fringes, because when you’re at the forefront of a scene you tend to be a big deal for a little while and then you sink when the scene sinks. So I’ve always consciously played on a slightly more avant-garde version of whatever scene I’ve been associated with.”

Post-Tresor, Landstrumm’s time with Mike Paradinas’s Planet Mu label, which yielded three albums between 2007 and 2009, found him allied with grime and dubstep. “I was never hugely accepted in that world,” he says. “But I did loads of gigs with people like (fleetingly famous dubstep producer) Joker, and it was interesting to watch people like him have this stratospheric rise and then fall almost as quickly. What happened to Joker is a really good example of someone being absolutely chewed up and spat out by the music industry. When I first met him he was making all this amazing funk music (his tracks had enough of an impact to be given a genre name all of their own: Purple). He was doing gigs for 200 quid for his mates and making great stuff, and then I played with him again not long afterwards and he was suddenly getting two and a half grand a gig, buying Audi A8s and living this almost footballer-type existence. He went from zero to this very highly paid DJ life, which resulted in him having no time to actually work on his music. The album that he was doubtless pressured into releasing around that time was terrible, and the whole thing just collapsed. It was a shame, because he was and is a super-talented guy. So you don’t get the huge paydays he had if you keep yourself out on the edges, but what you can get is longevity.”

With somewhere close to 50 releases to his name and at least one record out in every calendar year since 1995, Landstrumm certainly has longevity. He also has a fearsome work ethic and enthusiasm for what he does, though he laughingly corrects that to “blind perseverance in the face of adversity” when I mention it. His release and touring schedule has been characteristically crowded of late, with records on the likes of Zone and Don’t that have explored “fun club music with bassline and UK Garage influences”, and various reissues also in the works.

The influence of Jamaican ragga has been something Landstrumm has tapped again and again over the years, and his forthcoming Missing You EP for the MORD label does so once more. “I think that ragga influence is a brilliant ingredient to have in your music,” he says. “Even if it’s not as obvious as having actual toasting on it, passing elements of Jamaican music through the UK filter that all of my music has is something I’ve always loved doing.”

The restless creativity that’s fuelled Landstrumm’s whole career is evident in any prolonged exchange with him: a few hours after we talk he sends me a tightly wound slab of wonky synth-pop made in the hours since the interview, which he reckons might form the basis of a whole new album. He is also somehow managing to fit in a masters degree in renewable energy at the moment, and then there’s the children’s book he’s been planning. “My daughter is eight now, so I’ve been immersed in children’s books for a long time,” he explains. “I’ve already done a load of illustrations for it and I have a lifelong interest in creative writing, so I think I could probably weave the two into something pretty decent.”If this happens, it’s likely Landstrumm will carry the children’s-author game off with the same success he seems to enjoy in his every other creative pursuit. An important memo for Bloomsbury, though: exclude him from that next big anniversary party at your peril.

Neil Landstrumm’s Missing You EP is out on August 29. He plays alongside Truss at Pulse’s Festival Closing Party at The Mash House in Edinburgh on August 27., 11pm to 5am, £9