Faultline: Bunker Down.

Your Love Means Everything is in stores now.

David Kosten is in his bunker. He uses the word with fondness despite the fact he's talking about a windowless room in which several of the bulbs have blown. It's somewhere, he says, he's spent way to much too much time in the past few years. Still, it's his lair. A musician's cubbyhole.

"The bunker is a place where time disappears and I quite like that," he says. "I'm not really very good at anything else apart from music so it keeps me off the streets doesn't it. The irony is that although I've spent a lot of time here huge amounts of it has been unproductive and it's all about waiting for those little moments of sheer inspiration: I think most of my tracks were probably done in a couple of hours. It's about hanging in there long enough for those two hours to appear. It's an airless spot though. It could be better."

David Kosten is Faultline and responsible for one of the year's finest electronic albums, Your Love Means Everything, a lovely mix of melody and edgy imagination blessed with vocal contributions from Chris Martin (Coldplay), Michael Stipe (R.E.M.), Wayne Coyne (Flaming lips) and Jacon Golden, and some highly impressive guitar from the always impressive Nick McCabe (The Verve). It could have been another chill album with better credentials than most, that it isn't is a tribute to Kosten's flair as both an arranger and songwriter. Fans should check out the Faultline website (www.faultline.com) where Kosten gives detailed insights to the creative process behind each track.

"I'm as much a music fan as anything else," he says, "and I did that bit of writing for the website because I knew if it was me I'd be reading those things through, kind of devouring the little details that make it happen."

Like the horrendous - although funny to read - giant stinging Hornet infestation in Golden's studios. And the giant rat!

"I'm prone to these peculiar incidents," Kosten chuckles, "but I have to say the giant hornet one is something I will take to the grave. It was a classic. I remember the session engineer running around the studio with this giant hornet attached to his chest, screaming. It was fantastic. It was 2am, we were mixing a track, and this thing appeared and he didn't know where it had gone because the buggers fly pretty fast. Anyway, it had landed on his chest and we pointed to it and it became one of those classic things like a slapstick comedy as he ran around the mixing desk with his hands in the air, screaming. There were hundreds of the things in the control room over a period of a few months. Chaos.”

"The thing I couldn't believe about them was the first time one appeared we saw it on the control room window and went 'That is a queen wasp.' It was so huge, maybe four centimetres long, but to have hundreds of the fuckers all the same size... "

And you thought rock'n'roll was a safe business.”

Kosten has an ear for detail. That is what makes Your Love Means Everything so special. The rich imbroglio he creates is full of glorious atmospheres, not overblown but used with subtlety and flair. He knows how to set a song and how to give it life, how to take a vocal and let it breathe yet still sustain and enhance its richness with a perfectly pitched arrangement. It is an album where picking out highlights is futile. The highlight is the complete album. Yet for all the rant and rave that has gone down already, Kosten finds himself in a strange position.

"Everyone is being really positive about it but very little is kind of happening," he says. "It's kind of an odd spot for an artist to be in. I'm sanguine about the whole experience of releasing records. What I've done here is taken a risk. I'm making the best music I possibly can and I've made it as uninhibited and pure and direct as I can make it but I'm also really insisting that Faultline is music that doesn't have any compromise or any note that isn't there for a good enough reason. In my head I need to be able to justify every last second of this record and all work that I do.”

"Equally what I'm trying to do is push it through a major label machine where you might not always get the support you may feel you deserve. I find it a really intriguing position and I've kind of asked for it really. I've signed the Faustian deal and I have to pay the consequences. If ultimately people don't get to hear about my record then that's part of it. It's a very strange situation."