Ask Sean how the year’s been going, and the answer is basically a fixture list. ALFOS has barely had a weekend off since spring – Burger Disco Club in Athens, Waterbear in Brighton, the Phonox residency, Bugged Out Weekender, six hours with Tia Cousins at Edinburgh’s Bongo Club, a closing back-to-back with Vladimir Ivković at Corsica Studios, a homecoming of sorts at the Golden Lion in Todmorden, a 48-hour dash to WOMB in Tokyo.

The rest of the summer follows the same pattern – Love International, Convenanza (of course), Spirit of Eden, before it lands, for the first time, at Campo Sancho. Sean’s been orbiting that scene for years without ever quite stepping inside it, so it felt like exactly the right moment to catch up properly.

Nine hours at Campo is nothing to him. If anything, it’s the minimum. “Long sets let you tell a proper story,” he says. “You don’t have to hit every emotional button in the first hour.” That patience helps explain why the Tia Cousins partnership keeps growing – Bongo Club, then Amsterdam, with barely a word exchanged about the running order beforehand. “We know each other’s tastes well enough to leave doors open for the other person rather than trying to outdo each other,” he says. Ask if two people who no longer need to talk about it count as a hive mind, and he doesn’t dress it up: “Yes, probably. Tia is just ace.”

There’s a version of Sean who could be playing a different room every week, chasing whatever’s newest and loudest. Instead, he keeps going back to the same handful – the Golden Lion, the Berkeley Suite in Glasgow – and the reason has less to do with the rooms than the people running them. Gig Waka, Alan Grey, Fergus, Big John Badyin: promoters who, in his telling, actually care about the music, which in turn breeds crowds who turn up with open ears rather than a checklist. “Every visit becomes another chapter in an ongoing conversation rather than starting from scratch,” he says. “Those places feel less like gigs and more like catching up with old friends through music.” WOMB in Tokyo was over almost before it started – “airport, hotel, club, hotel, shopping expedition and back again” – the sort of trip where adrenaline gets you through the booth and the jet lag waits patiently until you’re home to collect.

The bigger nerves this summer are reserved for warming up for Sasha & Digweed alongside Roman Flügel – this just happened, it looked great –  a job that comes with its own particular pressure, given Flügel’s reputation as one of the most technically gifted DJs going. Sean and Flügel have form, having played together once before at Robert Johnson and quickly found a rhythm, but he’s honest about being rattled beforehand, regardless. There’s a story he tells about asking Andrew Weatherall how his own back-to-back with Flügel at Gottwood had gone. Andrew’s entire review ran to four words: “Roman is very, very good.” Coming from Andrew, that told Sean everything he needed to know.

Weatherall’s name is never far from Sean’s mind when he talks about back-to-backs, and he doesn’t dodge it when it’s put to him directly – how do the newer partnerships, with Tia, with Ivković etc, compare to the original one? “They don’t” he says, and he’s not interested in pretending otherwise. “That relationship was its own thing. It wasn’t just musical – it was decades of friendship, shared references and making each other laugh.” What’s followed since has been something different, rather than a replacement: a series of separate chemistries, each shaped by how differently people listen and what space they leave him to fill. “It’s not about showing how much music you know or trying to outdo each other,” he says. “It’s about trust, generosity and creating something together that neither of you would have arrived at on your own.”

Family life has been carving out more of the calendar, too – August is blocked off entirely before Campo Sancho and Convenanza close out the season, though the DJ brain, predictably, refuses to clock off completely. “I’ll still hear something in a café or on the radio and immediately think, that’s interesting,” he admits. The studio’s had no such quiet spell: remixes for Phil Kieran’s Le Carousel project, Random Factor, Auntie Flo, Strange Fruit and Jezebell have all landed this year, with no real system behind which tracks get picked up beyond a gut feeling that there’s somewhere new to take them – a vocal, a chord change, a groove pointing off in another direction entirely. A project with Tom Sharkett is, for now, staying exactly where it is: under wraps, beyond the confirmation that it’s ‘edits’.

The one with the most weight behind it, though, is a remix of The Watergirls’ cover of “Whole Of The Moon” for DFA – a song that arrives loaded before you’ve even touched it, and doubly so for Sean given how closely it’s bound up with the memory of Andrew and Keith (JD Twitch). “You have to respect songs like that because they already have a life of their own,” he says, “but if you’re too reverential, you end up making something that’s unnecessary.” His answer was to do two entirely different versions – a straight 4/4 dancefloor mix built for the club, and a dubbed-out breakbeat take pulling on Jack Dangers and Meat Beat Manifesto, all early-’90s sample-heavy psychedelia. Less a remix, by his own account, than a conversation with the original: “You can’t improve on a song like Whole Of The Moon, and you shouldn’t try. All you can do is illuminate a different corner of it.”

Which brings things round to Campo Sancho – a first for Sean, despite years of near-misses with Jim and the wider Sancho Panza crew. We’ve been going back recently to David Byrne’s argument in How Music Works – that music is written for the room it’ll be played in as much as anything else, shaped by the space before a note’s even played. Sean agrees that Sancho Panza’s built around sound and setting as much as any lineup, and that this is that idea in action. “The room tells you everything if you’re prepared to listen,” he says, name-checking a Robert Fripp talk making much the same point. “That’s not about pandering to the crowd – it’s about recognising the energy, the acoustics, even the time of day.” Knowing the crowd’s reputation going in hasn’t changed much about his prep, he insists – he’ll turn up with the usual pile of options and let the set write itself once he’s actually behind the decks. “That’s still the exciting bit.”

Push him to define the ALFOS sound after all this, and he keeps it tight: open-minded, psychedelic, emotional. “It was never about genres,” he says. “Andrew and I always believed that if records shared a feeling they belonged together, regardless of tempo or category.” There’s always one record refusing to sit anywhere, too – currently an Algerian cover of Rod Stewart’s “Do You Think I’m Sexy,” parked on the USB waiting for the one night it suddenly makes total sense. And after everything, what still makes a night feel like something rather than just another shift? Trust. “There is such a deep sense of trust that it never feels like simply playing records to people. It feels like everyone in the room is creating something together.”

We’ve watched Sean go from those early Drop nights to six-hour sets on the other side of the world, and honestly, it’s a joy to still be having conversations like this one with him. Long may it continue.

Sean Johnston and Hardway Bros play Campo Sancho this summer, with further ALFOS dates running through Kelburn Garden Party, Love International, Spirit of Eden, Christmas Steps and Convenanza. The Watergirls’ “Whole Of The Moon” remixes land on DFA later in the year.