"Can I just say I'm massively hesitant to do this, right?" says Josh Brent. "I've only done one interview before, 25 years ago, and when I read that back I was just like, 'Man, this is never happening again.'"

My conversations with Josh Brent about his work as Schatrax begin in mid-March 2020, as the COVID-19 outbreak is sweeping through the UK. "I'm the last person to be blowing my own trumpet at the best of times, but to be going out online talking about my label when all this is going on…"

Throughout our conversations about his music, Brent stresses how uncalculated everything related to Schatrax has been. And yet, looking back over a modest but significant catalogue founded in 1994, it seems so perfectly considered. The stark minimalism of the hand-stamped 12-inches, the crucial run of records up to 2001, the clutch of reissues and new productions that have followed since. If a lack of aesthetic is also an aesthetic choice, Brent perfected it with his pared down approach to Schatrax.

Intrinsically linked to the currents coursing through mid-'90s house and techno culture, yet operating according to its own internal logic, Brent's music is consummate club material. It ranks alongside artists like Gemini, Callisto and Mr G., those who have understood how to merge mechanical dance floor dynamics and innate funkiness with space to get a little weird when the track calls for it.

Brent's path into electronic music is not especially unusual. If anything, his tale is emblematic of his generation, coming of age through the '80s as the first waves of hip-hop started to break across the UK. Given how divergent the genres seem now, it's easy to forget that hip-hop and house music existed in tandem in many places, from soundsystems and warehouse parties to pirate radio. What set Brent apart was the education he received early on via access to his parent's extensive record collection, where Kraftwerk's Computer World sat next to Tonto's Expanding Head Band and Rupert Hyne as well as the more commonplace rock, funk and soul of the '60s and '70s.

"I'd be the weirdo up the park with the tape machine in my bag, playing music with my mates while we were mucking about," says Brent, who grew up (and still lives) on the Isle Of Wight, an island off England's southern coast. "I can remember having a little red-sleeved 7-inch of Gustav Holst's The Planets when I was around five years old."

He adds: "I'd already been scouring my parents' collection, then as I got older it moved on to the to the secondhand shops. I started going to Southampton and then up to London to places like Groove Records and Bluebird. When I was 18 or 19, there was this little secondhand shop that opened in town and I'd spend my whole wage packet on a Friday lunchtime. That was an education."

After saving up enough money to buy two Technics turntables and a Numark mixer in 1987, Brent was able to build on his skills as a DJ. His approach was rooted in hip-hop culture at its genesis—finding breaks and working up the technique to mix, juggle and scratch over the top. At the same time he and a handful of likeminded souls on the Isle Of Wight got together to put on parties in a local club, where they were able to play their hip-hop and early house records over a system instead of in their bedrooms.

One outlet Brent had for his DJing obsession at the time was mixtapes, which he and his lifelong friend Mark Little would duplicate and take up to London to hustle at Camden Market. Other times he was standing in the street in Southampton pitching them to passers-by.

"We'd either sell the master tape to somebody who would then make 50 copies and pay us through for that, or we made our own copies and sold them on the street," says Little. "We literally were those people just sat on the street or in Camden Market on a weekend, flogging tapes out of a case. There were some days where we had to fold the case up and leg it because the Old Bill were coming."

Alongside the hip-hop, Brent embraced the emergent house and techno sounds from the late '80s onwards. The UK was already incubating the early precursors to hardcore rave, which could be heard in the sped-up breaks powering Britcore rap outfits like Hijack and Hardnoise. "Hip-hop over here got faster and faster," says Brent. "The instrumentals were actually getting closer to 110, 120 BPM. That was a bridge between the hip-hop and the house thing, and then hardcore kicked off. So the whole thing basically in my head is all from hip-hop."

In tandem with his obsessive mixing practice, Brent was also developing his interest in production through the rudimentary four-second looper built into his mixer. In conjunction with his multi-track tape deck, he was able to stitch together breaks and samples, all sequenced and triggered manually. "I was obsessed with loops, and still am," says Brent. "I think [the sampler] taught me about the repetitive nature of music, the hypnotic thing. I can remember my family going mental at me for having the same loops going for hours, just scratching over the top of them."

"Josh made Durameter, which was a 20-minute mixtape of his own tracks, sampling his records and his parents' records, when he was about 17," recalls Little. "It was more hip-hop in terms of the approach, but it didn't sound like a typical Steinski or Coldcut, it was just something completely different. He didn't go for the obvious breaks."

As house and techno continued to grow exponentially in the early '90s, Brent was diverting more of his attention (and factory job pay cheques) towards the latest records coming into shops like Razzles in Portsmouth and Jelly Jam (in Portsmouth and Brighton). "In '91, '92, I'd be working 70 hours a week, saving up my money and going down to Jelly Jam in Brighton every couple of weeks," says Brent. "Every other day on my lunch break I'd be on the phone to Luke Slater or Tony, who were working down there, asking, 'What's in?' They'd be playing me bits down the phone and then they'd stick them in a bag for me."

Although Brent stresses he was never considering it as a career, connections were naturally being forged through his determined pursuit of music. He and Little were involved in putting on parties on the Isle Of Wight, where they would book DJs like Slater, Dave Angel and Dave Clarke. He can't remember how, but somewhere around 1993 he came on board as a resident for Brenda Russell, Colin Faver and Colin Dale's Deep Space, one of the key techno-oriented nights in early-'90s London.

"I've known Josh a very long time now," says Colin Dale. "I can't remember how often he was DJing at Deep Space but at that point we were working closely together. He was an excellent DJ, able to switch between genres easily in the mix."

Brent's straight-to-tape experimentation and his increasing immersion in techno and house led him to buying some more advanced studio equipment, including '90s staples like the Akai s950 sampler and the Roland Juno 106. Out of this deep dive into production came the first Schatrax 12-inch in 1994, a white label hand-stamped with the Schatrax logo on the outer sleeve and the track titles etched into the run-out groove. It was mastered and manufactured by Jah Tubby's JTS Studios in Hackney (a place with a strong reputation for bass-heavy cuts), and distributed by Kudos. Brent dismisses any sense of a game plan for the release—it was simply another point he was passing in his continued pursuit of sound. He even shrugs off any interest in how the record sold.

"There's no ulterior motive for me doing this," he says. "If it sold out, brilliant, but if it didn't sell I would still be doing it. I think I'd already made the next one I was going to put out before I knew if the first one sold."

Schatrax #1 was a tough record with a ravey bite. There was also depth in the production—it wasn't as abrasive and industrial as the sound being pursued by artists like Steve Bicknell, Neil Landstrumm and Surgeon. The follow-up was similarly techno-oriented. The B-side of this record carries one of his most enduring tracks to date. The lush, synth-embellished techno of "Roses" and "Snow Dogs" shouldn't be overlooked, but it's impossible to talk about Schatrax without addressing the monolithic "Mispent Years." It's a strikingly simple track, little more than an untreated, un-swung beat, a brooding bassline and a lead dripping with melancholy.

"At the time I'd moved my gear into a mate's garage," Brent says. "I just had a Juno and my s950. I think the whole track was just done on the s950. It was some 707 samples for the drums and then just one sampled note from my Juno 106 to do the bassline and the top line, and it was all just straight out of the Akai."

The track caught on quickly, especially in Scotland with Slam and the Sub Club crowd, where it became something of an anthem at their regular nights. Playlisted on high-profile mixes by the likes of Tiga and Sascha Funke, memorably placed as the finisher on Craig Richards' fabric 01 mix, and name-checked to this day, it's a classic through and through. It also helps illustrate the ambiguity of the Schatrax sound—too techno to be house, too house to be techno.

If someone were to claim "Mispent Years" was the definitive Schatrax tune, they could be instantly contradicted by any number of his tracks that came before or after. What binds together the Schatrax catalogue is a sound Brent describes as "warm rather than harsh, because there's nothing worse than being in a club that's just tearing your ears out with no soul in the music or no bass. The bottom end is the bit that glues everything together."

Around this time, Brent also partnered up with Allen Sai, better known as Aubrey, who had been working behind the counter at Razzles in Portsmouth. Together they launched the Cheap Knob Gags project in 1995. "Aubrey came over one afternoon and we got the first EP done in like an hour and a half before he left, so we put that out," says Brent. "After that, he used to send me a track over every now and then, and I'd do the other side and we'd release it."

There's a persistent matter-of-fact tone from Brent when he talks about these endeavours. Build tracks, press a record, put it out, repeat. It's a workman-like quality that typifies a lot of UK techno at the time, when dance music culture was splintering in diverse directions, from handbag house and happy hardcore to jungle, drum & bass and UK garage. This strain of techno presented itself as wilfully unglamorous. Anonymity and minimal aesthetics were preferable to showboating superstardom.

There's an imperial quality to the run of Schatrax records that followed on from this start—the craggy techno of "The Bell", the squashed machine funk of "The Great Game Of Time," the spectral groove of "Overcome" and the impeccable swinging low-rider "Restless Nights." There are the scattered in-jokes and easter eggs, from looped up The Simpsons-sampling skit "Homer's Dance" to the three-minute office ambience of "Desk People." Brent later reveals to me the latter is actually the sound of his Soundcraft mixing desk turned up loud enough to pick up disembodied voices (possibly via the analogue equipment in his studio acting as an antennae).

"The raw and sparse sound of '90s British underground house and techno is always close to my heart," says Craig Richards, a long-time admirer of Schatrax. "Some of the best of it is understated and in some cases unknown. Schatrax emerged in a characteristically understated way. Not everyone knew about it or cared for it but for sure the right people did. In those days the fact that Andrew [Weatherall] was playing "Restless Nights" was probably enough to set it in the right direction."

Secret weapons are a subjective concept within music. When you make a revelatory discovery in private, it can feel so personal it's sometimes hard to believe anyone else might even be aware of the music in question. Schatrax's low-key presentation feeds this tendency in record obsessives. They may be clichéd these days, but hand-stamped white labels will always hold an air of mystery that makes the music feel hidden from view. Even if Brent's aesthetic aim was purely practical—minimal effort, maximum efficiency—it speaks directly to his own vinyl fanaticism, and it also makes an apt vessel for the kind of floor-serving, depth-plumbing music he makes.

If the releases themselves were presented in an offhand way, the overall arc of the catalogue follows suit. In 1998 a self-titled compilation gathered together highlights from the first ten Schatrax releases. After that, things went silent for a couple of years before another vinyl double-pack and a standalone single appeared. That was the last new Schatrax material for some time.

During this time, Brent started a new label called a ma yi music, which carried a release under his own name called "Ayer's Rock." There are numerous other aliases and uncredited 12-inches he slipped out over the years. While he laments the way the internet has helped people "join the dots," he hints with satisfaction that some of his released work has so far evaded the Discogs detectives.

Studious listeners have pointed out that some tracks in Schatrax's digital catalogue differ from the original vinyl versions, with missing samples and other anomalies. "When I was doing the digital releases, I just put out the mix I preferred," he shrugs. "Back then there'd be three or four versions on a tape, because you do the mix-down live. Sometimes you go back and prefer a different mix a few years later. But it's also nice when you find a version you didn't know about of a track you've liked for years."

Schatrax went quiet for a while, although in 2004 a release as Josh Brent launched another one-shot label called 213 Underground. By 2007 he'd decided to reissue some of the key early Schatrax tracks as a series dubbed Vintage Vinyl, while some other early material popped up on Fear Of Flying. Vintage Vinyl returned in 2015 for another six 12-inches, and then finally in 2019 Brent came good with a new EP, 2501. Aside from his aversion to self-promotion, it's also clear Brent doesn't labour too intensively about when to release his music.

"Someone was asking the other day, 'What's your schedule for this year?'" Brent says. "I was just thinking, 'What? I haven't got one.' If I do some tracks this week and I want to put them out, then I'll do it. There might be two EPs in one month and there might be none for another five years."

Brent's approach ultimately remains in deference to the music itself. He says he's no different from "that 15-year-old kid in his bedroom mucking about with records." This attitude can be sensed in so many of his tracks, where the pointed action of the rhythm section suggests fortitude and a restless drive, while the smoky atmospherics and dubbed-out textures are that of a listless daydreamer unmoved by the wider world's obsession with tangible productivity.

"I guess time works differently on the Isle Of Wight, you know?" he muses. "I think I've just put the pen down for two minutes and gone to get a cup of tea. And then I come back and everyone's aged ten years."