If Russell "Rustie" Whyte was anything like his music, interviewing him would be a tough gig. He'd be bouncing off the walls, screaming his answers in your face and having to take Ritalin to calm down whenever you asked a question. Then, when you were done, he'd swallow your dictaphone and regurgitate it across the desk.

Rustie's debut album Glass Swords, you see, is a playful riot of a record, a neon tapestry of sonic thrills that incorporates 80s pop, happy hardcore, the Seinfeld theme, soft rock and hip-hop – often all at the same time. It refuses to sit still for more than a nanosecond and has been hailed by several critics as being at the vanguard of a new wave of "maximalism" in electronic music.

Luckily, at least for our dictaphone, Rustie is less manic than his music suggests. In fact, he's rather quiet, making you wonder how such unbridled musical energy can exist in one so hushed.

"I wouldn't say I'm really shy," he says in a soft Glasgow burr. "But I'm not an extrovert, so music's how I express myself best. It's my preferred way of communicating."

Indeed, if Rustie's music first attacks like a day-glo migraine, a couple of spins reveals an album imbued with real emotion. Rather than just overloading your senses, Glass Swords is a devil for the details – a dash of warm synth pad on Flash Back, an R&B-tinged vocal snippet on All Nite – that transform it from brainiac technical feat into a record that tugs at your heart. This is surely why the album was voted No 9 in the Guardian critics' Albums of 2011 poll. And it's also one of the reasons why it today scoops the Guardian's first album award – judged against a list of other British debuts of last year by a panel made up of four of our critics, the Manic Street Preachers' Nicky Wire and last year's winner Gold Panda.

One thing that made Glass Swords stand out was that it felt like a record that could only have been made in 2011. Not just because, as Rustie points out, the technology wouldn't have been advanced enough to handle it a few years ago, but also because it seems to represent perfectly our attention-skipping, information-crammed age.

"It just has this inherent energy that you don't find in a lot of electronic music," says Stephen Christian, head of A&R at Warp Records. "Listening to it can be almost like playing a game of Mario Kart, but it also has a depth to it. He's taking these quite 'cheap' sounds – tinny synthesisers, digital drums – and making them greater than the sum of their parts. He's creating a real musical thing out of these scraps of pop's past."

Rustie's musical journey was certainly a diverse one. As a kid he would listen to his parents' Beatles and Hendrix records, before falling in love with his own pop star, Michael Jackson. He sang in the school choir, then learned the guitar via Nirvana and Pearl Jam (both his voice and his riffs appear on Glass Swords, albeit heavily processed) before immersing himself in Glasgow's lively late-90s skateboard, graffiti and hip-hop scenes. He didn't start making computer-based music until he was 20, however, when he got acquainted with FruityLoops production software.

Doesn't this make him something of a late starter? "I guess I wasted a lot of time partying and stuff, just going out and … getting fucked!"

A vital part of any dance musician's education … "Yeah, I think so," he says. "I know a lot of people who make music but they don't really go out. And I've always felt that there was something lacking in their music because of this."

This viewpoint is interesting, not least because the album Rustie was up against in the final stages of the judging process was Katy B's On A Mission – another record that conveyed the thrills of the dance floor from the perspective of someone who quite liked a bit of a rave-up. Both records were forged through their creator's own clubland epiphanies and both seem to strike a blow for escapism during these grim economic times. Rustie, who admits to living life with his head in the clouds, agrees.

"You know that feeling you get when you go out, that feeling that's so great," he says, as close to animated as he gets. "Well, it's trying to recreate that on record, that sense of euphoria."

Rustie's raving days continued after he'd made a name for himself on the Glaswegian club scene, and pretty soon he was DJing at parties organised by the city's hedonistic Numbers collective. "It gets pretty crazy up there because Glasgow clubs have to close at 3am, so there's a big after-party culture," he says. "You'd go to somebody's house and carry on until two in the afternoon. Everyone gets to know each other. Sometimes the Numbers guys would put on warehouse parties, other times it'd be a house party."

What state were the houses in come 2pm? "Oh, pretty wrecked!"

Did you ever invite everyone back to yours? "Nah! I was still living with my parents at the time!"

This is the paradox of Rustie: the quiet man behind music's new maximalism; the off-the-rails raver who lived with his mum; the dancefloor detonator who still obsesses over the finest details of his music. In fact, after hearing the mastered version of Glass Swords, all Rustie wanted to do was add tweaks and adjustments – in the end he had messed around with it so much he had to get it mastered again. "I cost myself quite a lot of money," he grimaces.

Making the records certainly sounds like quite an obsessive process. "Very!" he agrees. "Staying up all night, not sleeping, just working … I have to try and balance it or my girlfriend will kill me!"

Playing this kind of thing over and over – it is likely to send you nuts, right? "You do go a bit mad. I had to move to a quiet bit of London. And I had to make sure the flat had a garden so I could get away from stuff. It's nice to just sit in my garden and …"

Decompress?

"Kind of, yeah. I think for the next album maybe it will be calmer. It probably has to be, this one is pretty intense!"

Aware of the stress of making solo records, Rustie is keen to work with other people in the future. He's especially eager to hook up with big-name artists from the hip-hop and R&B world – a smart move seeing as more underground, indie producers are being sought after right now, and often British ones. From hip-hop producer Just Blaze raving about fellow Scot Hudson Mohawke to Drake rapping over Jai Paul (not to mention another fellow Scot, Calvin Harris, making mega-hits for Rihanna), Rustie's time in the spotlight couldn't have been timetabled any more precisely. So who would he like to work with?

"I like the stuff Rick Ross is doing," he says. "I'd love to work with someone like Andre 3000. Some of my all-time favourite stuff is Neptunes productions. I think it would be good for me to work with other people."

Would he not worry about losing some of the artistic freedom that comes with making a solo record?

"Maybe," he says, pausing for a second. Then the man behind one of last year's most outrageous and attention-grabbing musical statements smiles and says, softly of course: "But then, it doesn't have to be all about me."