On a drizzly day in a suburban pocket of Tottenham, Grumbling Fur’s Daniel O’Sullivan opens his front door and invites me across the threshold to another dimension.

Entering his modest house, which from the outside seems no different to its unassuming neighbours, is like passing through a portal to a wyrd liminal world of visionary eccentrics and dark occultists, voyaging psychonauts and third-eyed mystics, where unruly plants lean against the window panes and stacks of science fiction paperbacks are flanked by stuffed peacocks and lion masks.

The house (which, along with its contents, belongs to the artist Ian Johnstone, former partner of the late John Balance of Coil) is a tangible microcosm of Grumbling Fur’s interior world, at once ancient and modern, domestic and cosmic. It was here that O’Sullivan and his long-time friend and collaborator (and solo artist in his own right) Alexander Tucker spent a year recording their second album, Glynnaestra, released this year on Thrill Jockey.

The pair first met through the hardcore scene while O’Sullivan was still in his teens, and were briefly in an aborted attempt at a “trashy, punk-poppy band”. Years later, O’Sullivan was playing with his avant-rock improv unit Æthenor (alongside percussionist Steve Noble, Stephen O’Malley of metal innovators Sunn O))) and Kris Rygg from experimental Norwegian metal band Ulver), “and we were going to do some shows, so I asked Alex if he would want to open up for us,” he says. “It was a disastrous tour.” “Oh, awful, awful,” deadpans Tucker.

Putting that hiccup behind them, the pair then reconvened to work on their first album as Grumbling Fur, 2011’s Furrier. Recorded with two other musicians – Jussi Lethisalo from Circle and David Smith from O’Sullivan’s old band Guapo – the album is looser and more organic in both structure and instrumentation than its successor, the electronic-leaning, and occasionally even poppy, Glynnaestra. A lushly textured, deeply psychedelic voyage from pastoral England to the edge of the galaxy, with abstract synth and found sound collages, lashings of Tucker’s signature cello washes and even a hymnal ode to Blade Runner’s replicant anti-hero Roy Batty, it’s one of FACT’s favourite albums of the past three months.

FACT took a seat next to the stuffed peacock to ask Tucker and O’Sullivan about mescaline-fuelled writing, “laminated sounds” and tears in the rain.

Glynnaestra strikes me as a very British sounding record, even – or especially – in its more psychedelic moments. Do you see yourselves as working within a particularly British lineage of experimental music?

Alexander Tucker: There was a period of time when I was just listening to American bands, but I’ve always had a really big love for bands like Cardiacs, and their sort of Englishness.

Daniel O’Sullivan: Things like This Heat as well, and Coil and Spacemen 3. There’s a rich lineage of English wyrd, with a y.

AT: Syd Barrett, The Beatles. We’re both massive Beatles fans [laughs]. It’s funny that it’s almost more out-there to say you’re a massive Beatles fan than to say you’ve got the whole Merzbow discography.

DO’S: But then we go one step further and say we’re massive McCartney fans as well.

AT: Oh yeah, early Macca.

But even with these British influences, the album seems quite consciously otherworldly, too. And it’s very different to your first record, which had a looser, more organic feel to its structure and instrumentation. How did you get from that to the electronic palette of Glynnaestra?

DO’S: I think setting up in this house really changed things for us, actually. I was in a real state of flux in my personal life and I found a centre of gravity again in this house. Other than that, we also weren’t really interested in repeating the first album.

AT: Yeah, and the amount of jam band albums [around], especially in the last few years, there’s so much of that. It’s fantastic whilst you’re doing it, but there’s so many examples of it, so what’s the point? And it doesn’t matter what you’re using to generate the sound, we’re not trying to take this genre or that genre and put it together, it’s not about that at all. It’s just using an electronic thing or an acoustic thing, it’s just a tool.

DO’S: Not being afraid to collage elements together.

What kind of machines and instruments did you make use of on the record?

AT: For me, I was marrying synths with cello and getting these really nice laminated sounds, and we just got really into these really homogenised sounds from different sources. We’re big 13th Floor Elevators fans, and you can really look at that music as a whole, as a nucleus, but then you can travel down into it and pick it apart.

DO’S: It’s presenting music without giving one voice particular emphasis. Allowing the whole thing just to be a society of sounds, in a way.

AT: Quite often we’ll start with really abstract elements.

D’OS: ‘The Ballad of Roy Batty’ started with little zen balls.

AT: They’re those little Chinese balls that you turn in your hand and they have chimes inside. I was doing a David Bowie in Labyrinth [laughs] and Dan immediately went over to the harmonium and came up with a riff, and from that we just started layering up the instrumentation, then the vocals, and in a few hours it was done.

DO’S: It’s always a game of exquisite corpse for us, responding to each other’s suggestions.

The first time you came up with the idea for ‘The Ballad of Roy Batty’ and played it through, did you have to laugh a bit afterwards?

AT: I think we cried! I think we got tearful, just ‘cos the emotion behind it was so potent. I mean it is beautiful, that part of the film. We weren’t worried at all about it seeming cheesy or naff or whatever, because we genuinely love the sentiment behind that end scene. Rutger wrote it himself.

DO’S: I think he developed quite a unique relationship with Ridley Scott on that film.

AT: And Harrison Ford pushed so much against Ridley Scott and they sort of fell out. I can’t remember what it was, he was just a grumpy sod or something.

DO’S: I don’t think he liked the idea of it being a sort of non-dualistic outcome. A lot of people have had problems with that film, that’s why there’ve been so many cuts of it, you know. Because Roy Batty is a creature of his own volition, but he’s also something that was made. And the references to Tannhauser [in the speech] are so remarkable, so cryptic, and even the invented terms, like c-beams… I feel like they’re being manifested into reality from something that’s already some sort of archetype, you know what I mean?

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