Svein Verge is a funny man. Uncertain of which half of the electronic music duo, Royksopp, I’ve been hooked up with, I ask the obvious question. Svein replies, “The guy with the big nose and black hair.”

And, kids, there’s more: “It’s 10am, I’ve just woken up in my home [in Bergen, Norway] and I’m walking around in a robe. I was working late last night. Me and my esteemed colleague in Royksopp, Torbjorn Brundtland].” Doing what? “Umm, sitting the studio picking keys [musical notes] and playing those keys on different instruments. We were just sitting there playing for hours in the middle of the night and it was an extremely slow piece of music with no audible beat … ” For the new album? “We are doing that now - in between New Age noodling.”

Experimenting with musical instruments isn’t anything new for this duo who were schoolmates in Tromso before meeting again years later in the 1990s in Bergen and becoming members of the Bergen Wave which also featured acts such as Frost, Erlend Oye of Kings Of Convenience, Those Norwegians and Drum Island. They officially became Royksopp in 1998 and made a mammoth impression with their gorgeous debut, Melody A.M., from which came a bunch of singles - Eple, Poor Leno, Remind Me and Sparks.

Eple was licensed by Apple Computers for use as the welcome music to its Mac OSX Panther operating system, playing the first time a user booted a new Mac. Now that’s fame!

Their second album, The Understanding, followed in 2005 and was even more elegant and beautiful electronica - for a duo that likes to noodle they sure understand harmony when they get serious. A live mini-album Royksopp’s Night Out followed in 2006 - it showed a band blissfully at home in electronic pop. Their new release is the latest in the popular Back To Mine series which brings in electronic bands and DJs to compile mix albums.

The Royksopp mix is to say the least eclectic: Talking Heads’ Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On), the Edgar Winter Group’s Above And Beyond, Legs by The Art Of Noise, and Funkadelic’s I’m Never Gonna Tell It waltz with little beasts such as Harry Thumann’s Sphinx, (would you believe!) Mike Oldfield’s Platinum (Part Three-Charleston), Meatball by Emmanuel Splice and Idris Muhammad’s Could Heaven Ever Be Like This. And there’s another dozen marvels weaving through the meltdown.

It sounds like Royksopp had fun. “We did it just before last Christmas, ” Svein says. “There’s really no that much to say about it. Let’s see. We’ve been approached quite a few times by different companies and labels wanting us to this kind of compilation. I’m bragging here! But we always felt like we either didn’t have the time or we weren’t able liberate ourselves from the thought of how we could single out 20 songs from the records we love. But liberate ourselves we did and once we did, despite having everything from hip-hop to dub to prog to club it all sort of fell into place.”

It is very eclectic though. Like Mike Oldfield? “Yes, it is rather eclectic isn’t it. We aren’t that serious about the things we do. It’s all joke - oops, I shouldn’t say that you’ll get the wrong idea; it has to be taken with a little smile, in this case a little cheery smile. It’s fun to have a DJ compilation which has all this unexpected stuff. If you just read a tracklist, it’s fun to do when you see Mike Oldfield on it.

“The album is really a tiny little reference map if you are a Royksopp trainspotter. We have the likes of the Art Of Noise on there - who have been a big influence on us. Then there’s Talking Heads with a Brian Eno-produced track and he’s a big influence on us, as well. There’s lots of little pointers. We did struggle though, initially, picking 20 songs from the thousands we love.”

So where do you begin? These guys, after all, have pretty legendary record collections.

“Well, in the end, it came down to the concept we had of Back To Mine which meant to us the disc to play when you’ve been out to a nice dinner and a party with friends, then you bring some of them back to your place and put on some music. So we put ourselves in that situation. We invited some friends down to our studio and I picked out 40 records and took them down and we played them.

“If we sat down and thought too much about it and the tracklist was to be carved in rock we’d have never done anything.

“There are a few obvious references in our music such as Depeche Mode but you don’t impress anybody by telling people the obvious so you don’t use the ones like that which are obvious.”

And so Royksopp turn their minds to a record which should help celebrate their 10th anniversary next year. Well, at least they are in their own unique fashion.

“We are doing things every now and then,” Svein says. “In terms of being good businessmen and being productive, especially nowadays when the average listener doesn’t stay that loyal, you need to be present all the time but not present. But we’ve decided we’re just too lazy to run around like that. We’re fairly relaxed and we make music when we feel like it. That way you make music you want to. We don’t strive to be masters of the universe, we’re just happy to be able to make a living out of music.”