Four Tet (English musician/DJ Kieran Hebden) is a soul man—although a quite atypical one. As a child, he was immersed in the sounds emanating from his father's varied and excellent record collection. That upbringing fostered in Hebden a voracious hunger for challenging music that continues to this day and feeds both his production and DJing activities. No matter the style of music he's exposing as a DJ or expounding upon in his own creations, Hebden imbues it with a soulful, questing spirit. Yet he never falls prey to the cloying cheesiness and pious proselytizing that often come from artists who take pride in bearing their souls.

With his latest full-length, There Is Love in You (Domino), Hebden appears to be pushing for some deeper emotion than what's normally heard in dance music, especially with the outstanding opening cuts "Angel Echoes" and "Love Cry."

"I'm very interested in trying to make music with depth to it," Hebden says over the phone from his London home. "I don't just do stuff because it sounds pleasant. I'm trying to put more of my heart and soul into it. A lot of the music I love most, especially music from the '60s and '70s, people like John Coltrane, those guys put records out with really heavy meanings behind them. It was their whole life tied up in that music. When I'm making records now, I'm trying to put myself into it as well, and not just churn something out. I don't want it just to be an exercise in production.

"I'm not a religious person," he continues, "but I find music something that makes some kind of sense of the world to me. It makes me feel I have some kind of purpose for living. It's one of the things that touches me most in a profound way."

As you can surmise from the title, There Is Love in You aims to tap into your heart—like millions of other records. What makes Four Tet's music exceptional is how he uses the timbres of Steve Reich–ian minimalist composition and the instrumental intimacy of British folk while also being rooted in soul and dance music. To unify those seemingly disparate attributes into coherent pieces is rare, and one sign of an extraordinary producer.

But Four Tet's music is far from a sterile exercise in genre-splicing. "One of the concepts of this record is the experience of bliss through music," Hebden says. He's trying to pinpoint "those moments when you're utterly lost in music, trying to escape everything in the world, be it listening at home or especially hearing it in a dark space at incredible volume. You can properly let go of feeling like normally human and have this different experience."

There Is Love in You is an unconventional album that's as intent on putting you into a trance as it is in making you dance. First single "Love Cry" is a bold choice to announce the record. For one, it's over nine minutes long. For another, it seems more like a mantra than something geared for radio play, with a velvet-toned female voice repeating the title in a manner that's both defiant and seductive replacing a standard chorus. Turns out, Hebden wanted that track to stand on its own and enter clubland's bloodstream away from the album's confines.

"['Love Cry'] is probably the clubbiest track on the record," he observes. "People who play house records could pick up on it and see it in a different light. If it's just on the album, it's a different thing." Hot British producer Joy Orbison also created a subtly chilled dubstep revamp that teases out the latent Balearic beauty in "Love Cry." Much of There Is Love in You was influenced by Hebden's increased DJ activity at revered venues like Fabric and Plastic People.

"I put in a lot of effort trying to make an album that will be a complete experience from beginning to end," Hebden says. "But I like the idea of people hearing 'Love Cry' as an isolated thing first. I never worry about song length. My music is as long as it needs to be. I don't care if it fits in with the agenda of record companies."

There Is Love in You seems like Four Tet's attempt to make a minimal tech-house record composed out of acoustic instruments or organic elements—or a convincing simulacrum of same. Whatever the case, he's bringing a warmer, more spiritual feeling to dance music.

"That's just my production sound in general," Hebden says. "Yes, [There Is Love in You] is more influenced by dance music and techy sounds, but it's the rhythms and structures that are influenced by dance music rather than the sounds. The types of sounds I use are still typical of those I've used on all of my records."

Hebden has the luxury of doing whatever he wants, with enviable support from Domino. The creative freedom has resulted in several outstanding releases, with 2005's Everything Ecstatic being perhaps Four Tet's peak. The disc's best track, "Smile Around the Face," seems to be trying to contain itself from cheesy overdemonstrativeness, but the unabashed joy still seeps out into the air, as a Minnie Ripperton–­like diva's ululations ripple skyward over the Jaki Liebezeit–esque tribal-funk beats. In fact, much of this full-length pays homage to Can's ethnic forgeries and robust, propulsive rhythms. It's a form of uncorny exotica that also kicks your ass into gear.

Everything Ecstatic arose from impulses very close in spirit to those guiding There Is Love in You, according to Hebden. "One of the ideas about [Everything Ecstatic] was the concept of feeling ecstatic through music, a tribute to the concept of passionate music," he says. "You see a gospel singer singing, and they believe they're communicating to God through their music. They're not just singing to create a bit of sound; they're singing because it's the most important thing in the universe. With 'Smile Around the Face,' I was trying to capture that sort of ecstasy through music."

It's remarkable how much Four Tet has changed since early releases like "Glasshead" and Thirtysixtwentyfive, nascent excursions into Krautrock and soul jazz, respectively.

"When I made [those] records, I was like 19 or 20," Hebden says. "I had just discovered all this cosmic-jazz music and was heavily into that, and I wanted to reflect that in [my own tracks]. With the early records, I was more interested in the idea of taking different kinds of genres and styles and squashing them together and seeing what would happen. Now there's still a lot of that going on, but with really different motivations and ideas.

"My music has to keep developing. The records need to be documents of my musical journey and exploration as it goes along. It's not about me endlessly putting out records trying to better what I did before or do an improved version of this one goal I'm always working toward. It's about me being on this musical journey and documenting it along the way. My records are like diaries of my life. I can remember all the little personal things that were going on in my life linked to bits of music. It's no different now."

With collaborations involving jazz drummer Steve Reid and moody dubstep don Burial; remixes for Radiohead, Madvillain, Bloc Party, and Aphex Twin, among many others; an increasingly hectic DJing itinerary; and production for Sunburned Hand of the Man—Hebden leads a busy, unpredictable musical life.

"I like things to be surprising. Things are best for me when I don't know what I'm going to be doing in six months' time. If people had told me I'd do all those albums with Steve Reid, I'd be shocked. If I knew I'd be so involved with dance music again at the moment, I would've been totally surprised. It wouldn't have seemed obvious to me five years ago. I love that I have a lot of room to go in a lot of directions; I'm not stuck anywhere."