It's nothing unusual to see madmen walking around Brighton doing strange things claiming it’s all in the name of art. Nor is it surprising to hear they’ve always dreamt of featuring in The Argus. What’s rarer is to discover they’ve actually made something useful of their creative investigation.

Dom Maker used to parade up and down the seafront holding a field recording device to capture the noise of cyclists and walkers passing by. He once spent three hours throwing rocks down a tunnel in Saltdean.

But, aside from supporting the Albion, he comes across as sane.

The tool he uses to conduct his sound science is similar to a Dictaphone but super sensitive.

“You can walk around with it, then go home, play it back and you have this incredible quality recording of any sound you hear,” he says from his girlfriend’s house near Bognor.

“People on bikes are classic because if you slow down the sound of someone cycling you get an incredible rhythm.”

The 24-year-old is one half of electronic group Mount Kimbie, whose debut album Crooks & Lovers featured in NME and Pitchfork’s Best Of 2010 picks.

They have been called pioneers of post-dubstep because they have taken dub, 2-step and grime and advanced the sound.

But it’s a misnomer in that any description of their music would need to mention the ambience, sampling and loops.

“A lot of what we do is stretching sound. If I record this conversation and stretch it out, there are bits of tone that can be explored and used as an instrument, kind of like a synthesizer.

“That side of recording fascinates us. We are not technically minded geeks as such, but have always enjoyed the idea of being creative with equipment rather than buying expensive gear.”

Perhaps that’s because Maker met fellow multi-instrumentalist Kai Campos at London’s Southbank University when the two were students.

That was back in 2007, when Maker was living in Peckham and the duo used to go to club nights where DJs spun early forms of dubstep, then later go home and try to recreate those bass-heavy sounds.

“We’d go to Forward [a dubstep institution] but the first night we ever went to was at Volks in Brighton. I suppose that was the spark we needed to get going.”

Another favourite was James Blake’s club night in New Cross, where they met the BBC Sound Of 2011 runner-up and convinced him to contribute to their live show. He returned the favour by remixing a Mount Kimbie track on Gilles Peterson’s BBC Radio 1 show in 2009.

Blake joined the experiment near Saltdean, where Maker’s family still live and he calls home in between trying to crack both the States (their most recent shows being Coachella, SXSW and a run of 800-capacity headline shows) and Europe.

“The one thing that doesn’t interest us in electronic music is everything being too clean.

“We see each sample as an instrument. We did three hours of singing and recording in Saltdean. It was great.

“James is cut up on a couple of those tracks or pitch-shifted but he’s definitely in there. He played keyboard on a couple of tracks too.”

Once the samples were downloaded onto the computer they were plugged into foolproof production tool Fruity Loops and moulded into songs.

Critics still say electronic music made in this manner is unskilled. But Maker and Campos are musicians who spent their teenage years in punk bands (“We played Climping village hall and birthday parties, but nothing was ever recorded and nothing was taken seriously. I thank God for that every day”) and both play guitar and drums.

Shows are done live, which gives them an edge over the DJ producer contemporaries Joy Orbison, Actress and Ikonica they cite as inspiration.

“We listen to loads of music and try to incorporate them into a collage,” says Maker, mentioning that a move to Berlin might be on the cards to join his Hotflush label boss Scuba.

But the man who has remixed Foals and The xx knows his roots.

“I was so excited about this interview,” he says, “We get The Argus every day.”