Of course it only takes a few minutes before we’re discussing Tonto’s Expanding Head Band.

“They made a couple of records in the early ’70s,” begins Jeremy Schmidt, moving through his cramped home off Main Street. “And they built this custom, crazy, sort of geodesic modular synth console called the TONTO. It’s featured in the movie Phantom of the Paradise.” After a pause, he adds, “I’m also a big fan of Brian De Palma.”

It’s a small aside but it’s worth noting, since the Straight is being immersed in the hermetic universe of Jeremy Schmidt, and we’ll need to keep our references in order.

Schmidt is the guy who brings that monstrous Keith Emerson keyboard vibe to Black Mountain. In his solo guise as Sinoia Caves, he’s a vintage-synth obsessive with a slight but powerful discography that’s attracted global renown. Next week, Sinoia Caves will headline the New Forms Festival in the almost stupidly appropriate OMNIMAX theatre at Science World.

“The last show I did was at the planetarium, so I’ve got a bit of a modern-science-pavilion streak going, which suits me just fine,” he says. When I mention that New Forms Festival director Malcolm Levy described him as “one of the most influential musicians in contemporary music in Vancouver today” and part of “a larger international movement within electronic music”, Schmidt seems genuinely taken aback.

“Not in the way that somebody like Morton Subotnick is,” he offers, cunningly dropping—Madlib notwithstanding—the highest-profile name coming to New Forms this year. Subotnick is the pioneer behind 1967’s landmark electronic suite Silver Apples of the Moon. He’ll follow Sinoia Caves at the OMNIMAX.

“I’m very excited about that,” Schmidt says, before going on to dismiss (with characteristic modesty) the idea that he’s part of any larger community. He certainly isn’t prolific—Sinoia Caves has released a whopping two albums in 12 years—and he’s fairly publicity-shy. “That’s true,” he says, with a laugh. But either on record or hanging out in his real-life cave, Schmidt is clearly somebody dedicated to pursuing a lifelong muse. In fact, he’s soaking in it. “I’ve been obsessed with the same kinds of things for a long time and I’ve been honing a small but, hopefully, expanding canon based on those same things that I was interested in decades ago,” he admits, before pausing in front of the cocoonlike room that houses all his gear. “Here, I’ll show you the closet.”

Inside the tiny “closet”, aka “the Space Nook”, stacks of battered old keyboards tower over a rack of Moog Tarus bass pedals, along with other, more mysterious items boasting names like the Memotron. There’s a poster of a Ferrari on one wall. Opposite is a space where Schmidt’s Don Johnson poster would be hanging if it hadn’t fallen down recently. “It’s from Grade 6. I was a huge Miami Vice fan,” he explains. His favourite piece of equipment is a Mellotron he picked up from a guy in the B.C. Interior 15 years ago. “It’s a treasured possession. I’ve just been a huge fan of Mellotrons for pretty much as long as I’ve known what they are. To me, it’s just a perfect instrument in spite of their myriad idiosyncrasies.”

In general, you could say Schmidt is big on “myriad idiosyncrasies”. Back in the living room there are, naturally, stacks of vinyl everywhere, with precisely the kind of thing you’d expect to find in Jeremy Schmidt’s record collection—New Order, Loop, John Foxx, David Bowie, Amon Düül, The Shining soundtrack—sitting alongside mouthwatering obscurities like Cybotron (“But not the Detroit techno band, this weird Australian synth band”) and, um, Slippery When Wet, by Bon Jovi. “I kinda like that record,” he says, with a broad grin. “I certainly like the cover. The cover’s amazing.”

The inevitable question—if we can move on from Bon Jovi (please)—is what, exactly, is Schmidt trying to achieve with Sinoia Caves? Debut album The Enchanted Persuader (2002) staked its turf somewhere between Popol Vuh and, in its acoustic-guitar-dappled moments, something like a robot-led version of freak folk. Sinoia Caves’ new release, the stunning soundtrack album Beyond the Black Rainbow, is the perfect analogue (see what we did there?) to the meta-retro mindfuck that prompted it, namely Panos Cosmatos’s insane 2010 sci-fi movie that was designed to look like it was made in 1983 by a lunatic accidentally hired by Roger Corman.

“I never assumed there’d be any interest or demand for it,” he says. “I knew there was at least a very marginal niche group of people who had seen the movie and were like, ‘Oh! What about the soundtrack?’ But there’s no way of gauging how widespread that interest is.” Sure, but there’s a way of gauging its quality. Pitchfork awarded the album a beefy 8.1. The Straight is hereby bumping it up to a nine point—I dunno—six, say. By any measure, it’s a great fucking record.

Here’s another indicator: Beyond the Black Rainbow is being released through the U.K.’s Death Waltz Recording Company, a boutique label specializing in retro soundtracks with a coolness factor that exceeds even that of its North American partner in the enterprise, Jagjaguwar.

But to be fair: Schmidt is doing much more than just fetishizing the past with his music, right?

“Yeah, I suppose at a glance what I’m doing, arguably, is looking back more than ahead,” he answers, “but I guess I’m resistant to thinking of those things in terms of any kind of strict dichotomy or whatever. I see the past, in terms of how we assess, negotiate, and interact with it, as something that’s always revealing more of itself, and constantly emerging in the present. Negotiating the past is like a constant feature for me.” Beyond that, Schmidt also cops to a “quasi-mystical” appreciation of the hardware he’s using. “It’s something akin to ‘the secret life of machines’,” he says. “With antiquated synthesizers in particular, they exist as time capsules that house sounds, indigenous to a very specific era, which are quite literally suspended within them. That shit just seems to blow my mind continuously.”

That might be the key right there. You could propose that Sinoia Caves is Schmidt’s way of blowing his mind continuously, if you consider that his mind is still seized by a maniacal preoccupation that began when his “high-tech uncle”, way back in the ’70s, handed Schmidt’s mom a tape with Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here on one side, and Jean Michel Jarre and Sparks on the other. A brief detour into the wild variety of fan-generated theories that swirl around Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining provides another big clue.

“I probably do a similar thing musically with records and stuff that I’m really enamoured with,” Schmidt muses. “I’ve probably sat and stared at the cover for Atom Heart Mother and read the sleeve notes thousands more times than anybody who was involved in making it. And from that I developed some sort of sensibility or meaning that I’m sort of trying to project in whatever I’m doing. I’m sure that obsessive fandom breeds interesting art sometimes. I’m sure it also makes a lot of shit art as well.”

Schmidt is on the other side of that line. See Sinoia Caves at the OMNIMAX for the evidence. By any reasonable expectation, your headband will be expanded by the experience.

Sinoia Caves plays the New Forms Festival next Thursday (September 18).