Eric San has what’s known as an infectious laugh. As we get further into our interview (a transatlantic phone call between London and Montreal), the Canadian DJ’s sporadic and slightly disarming bursts into fits of seemingly un-prompted laughter become more and more regular, not to mention hysterical.

The reason I call it infectious, though, is because I find myself doing exactly the same thing. And I don’t know why.

But this bizarre trait of San’s (also known as turntable legend Kid Koala) is just one of a series of oddly endearing quirks. He seems, for instance, to think in slow motion, and the resulting soft, Canadian, pondering drawl somehow has the effect of leaving you hanging on every word…waiting… almost… painfully… for… the… next.

The slow-motion delivery is worth sufferning, though. San is entertaining, and a deep thinker. Why do you work alone? I ask. “Well, you know…there’s a recession on,” he explains before entering into another one of those long bursts of inexplicable laughter (to which I, in turn, break into fits of unexplained giggles).

Eric San is one of the founding genii of modern sampling. Signed to Ninja Tune in the 90s, he’s been at the forefront of experimental turntablism ever since. Bizarre, twisted, deeply whimsical music is what we’re talking about here; the blending of samples to create new soundscapes that are part hip-hop, part brain haemorrhage.

Though still a DJ (he’s currently working on the next album – another four-year project), recent years have seen San concentrating more and more on his other passion, graphic novels.

So what’s the next one about? “Fatherhood, actually,” he says of the book that will be released alongside the next album. “Did you hear the baby crying before?” I did - queue inappropriate descent into fits of hysterics (this time I think it might even have been me that started it).
“Everything that I do is sort of four or five years in the making,” he continues. “When I actually had the first draft of this it was probably about 2004 and he [the baby] is ten months old now, so I guess I was preparing for it [fatherhood] and now I’m kind of flashing forward and flashing back with it. Maybe I prophesised the fact? Maybe it just worked out that way? I don’t know.”

Prior to starting the latest graphic novel, San was working on a book about a mosquito that played jazz clarinet (as they do). He explains that he had to abandon the project after it went way over budget and his collaborator ended up having a child. “Possibly,” he says, “we’ll go back to it at a later date”.

Despite the thematic elements of book and album not necessarily being connected, there seems to be a stylistic link between his art and music. The black and white linear drawings with their millions of spidery lines and bleak, scribbled form seem to mimic the schizophrenic, disconnected style of much of the music. There is also something to be said in both of his artistic outputs being a reflection on the workings of his mind. It is well known that all animators are mad (especially the guys who do Wallis and Gromit; moving clay models a fraction of a millimetre over and over for months on end); is it the same with graphic artists-cum-DJs?
“There’s a little bit of madness that comes from my experience of making it,” he says. “I think just making records like this is in its own way kind of equivalent to being an animator. You know, you are looking for little things like hi-hat hits and little staccatos and cellos and you’re trying to find all of those and at the same time look for melodies. That’s why I take so long to do a record and then in the end the record is only about half an hour long you know?

“Half the time you are looking for source material and then after that you have to practice on the turn tables to get all the rotations right and all of that part right. The actual recording process of it is actually quite short, but getting all that ready – having your palette ready so to speak – takes years for me. That’s kind of why I’m not more prolific I guess. I chose a path that involves some pretty tedious ways of making music. And it’s mainly just me. Lonely times.” (Another long break for laughter).

And are the graphic novels an escape from that intense studio time? “There’s only a certain amount of time that I think you can spend in a studio by yourself loading records in your head, and you kind of need to get out for a while, so that’s just how it has become. It was actually a release from music you know, because otherwise you would go mad.”

Other forms of light relief from the maddening processes of sample driven music making include the ‘Listen while you Draw’ bake sales that San and his wife run in their hometown of Montreal. With most of his friends being animators, San has discovered that the only way to get them out of the house is by organising five or six-hour long down-tempo DJ sets to which people can draw to (punters get a free cup of hot chocolate and a pencil) whilst eating home-made cakes and pastries from wife Corine’s bake sale.

It’s typically quirky, typically Kid Koala; like everything he does and says it comes from his own cookie place that’s pleasingly very much to the left of the field, and when he goes on to tell me how he was heavily influenced by Jim Henson’s Muppet Show and Monty Python records, I’m somehow not at all surprised.

“There’s all that madness but then in the midst of all that there would be some music,” he says of Monty Python. “There would be some tender moments too, but then there would also just be that chaos. I kind of liked the way a lot of that stuff always had exciting stuff to look for in it. You just never knew where they were gonna go to, and it always seemed like every subsequent listen would lead to you hearing stuff you just didn’t pick up in the first place.”

San says he aims to have everything done - both the record and the book - by November this year. I get the feeling he’s not the sort of artist to work to tight schedules though, and take this finishing date as only a loose projection of when we might actually see another Kid Koala project – whether aural or literary.

As I put down the phone on the odyssey of our conversation, I reflect on just how weird it was and can’t stop laughing. I wonder if San is sitting at home in Canada staring into space and doing exactly the same thing. He probably is.