"I can't play anything, I just use the gear," is how Simon Leonard sums up his role within experimental electro-pop band I Start Counting. Along with partner David Baker he's currently responsible for Fused - one of the most refreshingly innovative records to have landed on this desk for months. The combination of Simon's programming and David's keyboard and vocal dexterity have led to an album that encompasses styles ranging from avant-garde House-style sampling to ambient soundtracks, with perfect pop blended somewhere in between.

The name I Start Counting may be new to some people, but as the band themselves admit, they're most famous for their regular appearances in record shop bargain bins up and down the country. They started out doing discos at the student bar of Middlesex Polytechnic, and around 1982 formed the band that exists today. Simon had grown accustomed to technology through his time in File Under Pop, a noise band in the Throbbing Gristle mould, in which he "played" a test oscillator.

"I bought a Roland MC4 sequencer for £1,400 which was a lot of cash, but it was really good", he says, explaining his move into more conventional instrumentation.

"I knew Dave was interested in writing songs, so I started programming the MC4 and we got together. I'm no keyboard player although I know where chords are and our roles are pretty interchangeable. Dave's learned how to use all the gear and I write most of the words, but it's fairly flexible."

They put their relative lack of chart progress down to a continual shift in their musical style.

"What we try to achieve is changing all the time because we enjoy listening to changes", David explains. "Usually, if we've just done a pop song we want to do something different for the next one. I think that's why we've not made any great progress, because we don't follow any one direction. It would be more commercially sensible to stick to one thing and decide we were going to be completely electropop or a dance band or completely weird, but I think we'd just get bored if we did that."

"We really like pop songs and we really like doing systems things and Front 242 type stuff as well", adds Simon. "We've got songs already for the next album and that's going to be all over the place really. There's a folky song and an elegiac systems thing and an extremely aggressive Nitzer Ebb/Front 242 type thing and lots of garage electronic stuff."

One development for the next album is the addition of special guest "vocalist".

"I don't really like singers all over things", Simon begins. "There are obviously a lot of records that are really good which have got real singers on, but for my personal taste I prefer to be drawn into a record rather than being screamed and wailed at. Having said that, I've got a friend who's a bit of a whizz and he's made a me a machine based on a speech synthesiser chip, programmed so I can make it talk and sing over MIDI. You can change the pitch and character of the voice and sequence it so that it always comes in on time."

While they're waiting to enter the studio, the band are currently locked up in the songwriting process, at home in North London. The equipment they're using has been kept to a minimum, although when they're in the studio they tend to use anything they can lay their hands on. The majority of sequencing these days is done on the band's preferred Roland MC500.

'One of the things I really appreciate the MC500 for is that it's exactly on the beat and completely rock solid", Simon enthuses. "I can't trust Atari-based sequencers - I think it's really naughty that all the tracks are out of sync, although I've just got Real Time which looks quite good. The problem's money really. There's loads of gear I'd like, but we just haven't got the quids. But for working at home we're pretty well alright. We can use almost all the channels available."

Aside from music, I Start Counting spend a lot of time ensuring their videos are truly representative of their work. The promo for their latest single 'Million Headed Monster' was entirely produced at home by Simon using nothing apart from an Atari computer. Another video project also led to a collaboration that resulted in I Start Counting working on their first film soundtrack.

"A couple of people who did some videos for us were making a film and they asked us to do the soundtrack to one section", David explains. "The film was called The Blessing, and we did the section where there was a car chase. We decided it would be really good for the LP as well, so we remixed it for that. We keep meaning to do more things like it because there's only a couple of things like it we've done - not a song, just playing around with noises. When you do a song and agonise over every little drum sound or whatever it's great to just plug in and go crazy apeshit with loads of nasty noises. It clears the ears out very nicely."

That could be the slogan for I Start Counting, really. With the humour of 'Grassnake' or 'Million Headed Monster', the sampling ingenuity of 'House' and the perfect dance pop of 'Lose Him', Fused is the aural equivalent of an antiseptic mouthwash after a particularly hot curry. Or something along those lines...