“When I was a kid I played a Yamaha keyboard,” says a slow-talking Kath from his Toronot home. “But then I discovered The Stooges so I gave that up and played bass in a Stooges cover band for a few years with some drinking friends.”

Although he missed Asheton's and Iggy's reformed Stooges shows - “all I have is a bootleg video of them from the early 70s” - Kath says it was the Detroit masters' seminal sound that he first used as a sampling base back in 2004.

“While I was in the Stooges cover band we went on tour in America,” he explains. “We had a few days off in LA where I downloaded ACID Pro 4, which is a really simple program that lets you cut up MP3s. So I started cutting up Stooges songs and I would just take split-second fragments and try to make something out of them. And that was my style with sampling - I would chop things up to death.”

Before long, Kath had stockpiled a cache of sample-heavy instrumental tracks that needed a little something extra to flesh out his creative vision. He found it in pint-sized Alice Glass, howling vocalist in noise-punk outfit Fetus Fatale.

“I thought that she was the missing ingredient,” Kath says emphatically. “As soon as I heard her lyrics I knew that that's what my tracks were missing - her view of the world. I remember that everything she said was completely original and I'd never heard anyone say anything like it before. I loved everything she was doing in that band.”

Drafted into the Crystal Castles rank(s), Glass assumed total control of all lyrical and vocal content, thus becoming a foil to and a front woman for programmer Kath, who had recently remixed tracks for Bloc Party and The Klaxons.

“I gave her my instrumentals and just told her to write whatever she wanted over the tracks,” Kath says. “She likes what I do and I like what she does - we don't mess with each other.”

Preceded by the soundcheck-cum-single ‘Alice Practice’, leaked unauthorised into cyberspace in 2007, the pair's self-titled debut album from last year manipulates arcade game synth-punk into distorted shards of computerised nihilism. The record has very quickly earned the band cult status and gigs at Iceland's Airwaves festival - “the coldest weather I've ever experienced” - and on Glastonbury's main stage where the duo left a lasting impression.

“What happened was Alice had climbed onto the lighting rig or something and they turned our power off,” Kath explains. “I thought 'oh, nice timing for my gear to stop working!' but then someone told me it wasn't my gear, we had our power cut.”

Similarly controversial is Crystal Castles' so-called association with the 8-bit scene, a subgenre of acts using computer technology commonly found in old Commodore 64s and Gameboy consoles. It remains a touchy subject for Kath.

“I'd rather not talk about it,” he says. “It's so not relevant to what we do.” Though after a pause, he opens up.

“There's a really nice world out there of 8-bit bands where great musicians are creating great songs,” he says. “But we don't want to get lumped into that because those bands are 100 percent 8-bit where it sounds like you're actually listening to an Atari whereas our music might have 5 percent 8-bit in it. I think we're more like Daft Punk and New Order with noise punk on top of it.”

Currently writing their second album for a September release, the duo and a live drummer will arrive in Brisbane on Friday, a destination Kath never imagined he'd visit.

“The final thing I want to talk about is actually how shocked we are by the fact that anyone's listening to us,” he says. “When we started we really just thought we'd record some songs and that would be it y’know? Maybe do one tour across America of basement parties. But we're shocked that anything more than that has happened. It's a complete surprise.”

Steve Tauschke

Crystal Castles plays The Met this Friday February 6