I started the album with death – that immediately puts you in a space that gives you some hope." I scan Actress's face for irony: nothing. As we sit in St Paul's Cathedral, an eerily perfect choir practice reverberating around the building's gold-laced dome, talk has turned a little cosmic. "The themes of our world are based on God, the devil, temptation and the loss of paradise. We are the walking dead – there's only one thing that's guaranteed in life, that we're going to die."

Actress, AKA Darren Cunningham, isn't having some road to Damascus moment here – he's describing the core of his new album R.I.P., a narrative that takes in death, ascension, blessing, and a journey across a purgatorial landscape dodging temptation and ravens, all before returning to Earth. This struggle isn't picked out in lyrics, but in track titles and a supremely evocative sound that lurches between blissful chiming, jacking snares and industrial churn. You could tag it 'techno', but that would do a disservice to Cunningham, who has created for himself a totally singular voice.

Cunningham grew up in Wolverhampton and played football for West Brom, before an injury in the early-00s sent him out of the game and into music, first DJing, then producing, via a Roland Groovebox and a Dictaphone. "I really squeezed that machine to the point where it led me to getting a computer," he says, "which added a new dimension to it. What is that sound? Where did that come from? It was like working for Nasa or something, like, 'Whoa, I can instantly be on Neptune.'" He set up a label, Werk Discs, and released his first album, Hazyville, in 2008 after four years of work. "I was smoking a huge amount of weed, and working literally from 10 'til 10, not eating, not looking after myself," he remembers. "I just started playing with samples, blurring them to the point where they just became like ink, like paint, just so solid and concrete.

"You go through a few barriers with your sound, and you get to the point where you're just dripping in your environment, dripping in the sounds you're producing, and you instinctively know how to hone it and sculpt it together. It just reverberates as the years go on, the studio evolves, you evolve as a person, you dabble in different chemicals, you go to different nightclubs. Your dreams influence what you do, your nightmares, your family. It's osmosis, totally subconscious; you're just this vessel."

He describes being "dead" when he works, only able to reflect on what he's made afterwards. "I don't have pre-ideas, I have ideas after I've done the track. These pictures start to emerge." He framed his second album, 2010's Splazsh, as a series of studies of previous styles – Prince's boogie, John Carpenter's synth menace – given his own stamp. For R.I.P. he ordered tracks from years of production into the aforementioned narrative, partly using Paradise Lost as a guide. "Being able to program music is a science, but, for me, the ideas that I come out with are religion. Like every human being, I'm totally flawed, totally rebellious, totally sinful. So it's almost repentance, a self-flagellation. When it's time for me to leave this planet and I stand at the gates of heaven, and they're like, 'Well, what do you have to give us, Darren, why should we let you through here?' I'll be like, 'I tried to write something, and here it is.'" His face, mostly impassive, crumples into a wry feminine grin before folding back again. "I wouldn't be able to write the music that I write if I didn't believe in God, trust me. But the reason I wanted to come to St Paul's, it's not just the religious aspect, it's [seeing] the craft you get through believing in something."

Just as his tracks are unique hybrids, he has a hybrid spirituality – R.I.P.'s Raven reflects on potential avian reincarnation. Cunningham likes to find beauty in what's commonly perceived as ugly, particularly low-quality compressed digital sound on the euphoric The Lord's Graffiti. "I love vinyl, but over a certain time it degrades, it gets battered. Same with marble, same with anything – because of interference, air, water, whatever it is, it becomes eroded. And that's the way I think about the presentation of my documented work. Even though I'm working in the digital realm, that sound is going to wear, so I'm going to wear it down at the front end as well. Fidelity is not something that's high on my agenda."

Tracks from Splazsh, particularly Maze, appeared in DJ sets across the genre map, and he's crafted a hugely varied set of remixes for Panda Bear, Radiohead, Laurel Halo and Kasabian among others. DJing in London last year, he dropped Axel F and the Cure amid classic house and Plastikman. R.I.P., however, oscillates purely between beatlessness and monolithic 4/4.

"For me it's the rhythm of life; your heartbeat is in 4/4. Techno and house, these are the things that keep me in equilibrium. When I make music I'm completely shut away, so when it comes back to getting my feet on the floor, I need that music to keep me charged, keep me active. Everything is

x and y axes" – he points to the chessboard tiles on the cathedral floor – "but I like to bleed within that grid as well. The 4/4 is always there and quite incessant, but the flesh is working around that grid."

The album's cover image – an abstract, angelic figure – came to him in a dream soon after returning from the Congo, where he took part in Oxfam and Damon Albarn's DRC Music project. "It's so primitive there, it's like going into the future. One of the first things Oxfam said was that it's wise to stay within this compound. Don't go off by yourself. And of course on the first day, here's me, smoking the local weed, hanging out with these lads, going into their towns by myself, totally exposed, not knowing any French whatsoever. When you're completely away from the safety net, things happen. You experience things in a completely different way."

The creative catalyst of the trip will feed into his next record this year, Ghettoville, a "sequel" to Hazyville that he's planning to record in Jamaica, where he'll "smoke a lot of weed and see what happens". The total immersion method, however, will remain the same. "It's like people who make pop tracks, when they know they have a number one hit. I know at a certain point when that track is me, I'm the track now, this is what I am, this is what I'm meant to be. Don't take me anywhere else."

R.I.P. is out on Friday on Honest Jon's