Avery isn’t arguing for some mythical golden age, and he isn’t dismissing the new generation entering electronic music. His concern is simpler: the warehouse parties in Chicago, the birth of Detroit techno, the acid house explosion in Britain in the late eighties, the early days of New York’s queer club scene. None of those movements emerged as intellectual exercises. They emerged because people were searching for collective experiences unavailable anywhere else, and their power came from participation, not analysis. “I do firmly believe it has a real link to spirituality,” Avery says. “Almost religion.” The comparison might sound grandiose if similar language hadn’t appeared throughout club culture’s history, from sociologists comparing raves to secular rituals to Germany’s formal recognition of clubs as legitimate artistic institutions. I mention seeing Charlotte de Witte at Brooklyn Mirage and being struck by the gap between how society treats opera houses and how it treats dance floors. Avery laughs. Germany, he points out, comes closer than most to closing that gap. “People get their backs up about the scene sometimes,” he says. “But anyone can come. That’s the beauty of it.”

That openness is central to who he is as an artist, and it also informs his discomfort with increasingly rigid ideas around authenticity and belonging. The original spirit of acid house was radically inclusive. Anyone could walk through the door. But Avery is equally aware that escapism has its limits. As a younger man he was captivated by clubbing’s ability to make reality temporarily disappear. “I still believe in that,” he says. “But it is a fine balance.” The older he gets, the less interested he becomes in choosing between those worlds, the kinetic energy of the club on one side, silence and nature and solitude on the other, and the more drawn he is to the point where they intersect. Whether making the euphoric techno of Drone Logic, the ambient expansiveness of Illusion of Time, the widescreen electronics of Together in Static or the shadowy intensity of his most recent album Tremor, Avery keeps returning to the same emotional territory: not darkness for its own sake, but the peculiar warmth that can exist inside it. When he talks about Tremor, he references Massive Attack, Portishead, Nick Cave, Aphex Twin, David Lynch and David Fincher, artists who shared a fascination with ambiguity, whose work was unsettling but also strangely inviting. “Something about that late-’90s aesthetic just went in very deep,” he says.

As our conversation ends, he starts talking about films he’s seen recently, exhibitions he’s visited, long walks outdoors. He speaks with the enthusiasm of someone still surprised by art’s ability to shift how the world feels. “Anything that reminds us we’re here for something bigger than just work,” he says. “That’s what I’m into.” It feels like an unexpectedly fitting note from someone whose career has largely been devoted to building temporary worlds for people to disappear inside. Not an escape from reality exactly, more a reminder that another version of it is possible. Avery performs at Rising Melbourne this year, and if the conversation is anything to go by, a room full of people losing themselves in the dark is still exactly where he wants to be. The dance floor, at its best, has always offered that. Avery, despite everything that has changed around it, still believes it can.