PERSONALLY, I can’t listen to music while “making out”. As a former music journalist who’s married to another music journalist, any potential selection would be a minefield.

Take a fairly standard track, such as Marvin Gaye’s classic bunk-up anthem Let’s Get it On. Thirty seconds of deep, meaningful physical communication would be broken with: “You’d never believe Marvin Gaye was freebasing cocaine when he recorded this, would you? Most coke albums have the treble very high, eg, Be Here Now, Addicted to Love, etc, but this has a perfectly balanced mid-range. On reflection, I think Let’s Get it On is probably second in my Tracks that Surprise You When You Find out the Artist Was on Crack When He Recorded Them list. With Smokey Robinson’s Being With You at No 1, obviously. Stop! Come back! Have I put you off?”

“No — I’m just going to Google the release dates. It would settle my mind to be able to put them in chronological order.”

However, for those who can listen to music while “getting moody”, as Christina Aguilera puts it, there has been a recent development. For while there are a million albums in existence that eulogise the handiness of having some sex, right now there aren’t many that are actually made of sex. Or, to put it another way, the 26-year-old New Yorker Jessica Vale is, as far as I know, the only person to release an album with snare-sound constructed from the sound of “ass slaps”.

“Every single sound on the album comes from some kind of sexual event,” she confirms, talking about last week’s internet release of The Sex Album. “I knew I wanted to make an album about sex, and I thought if we’re making songs that are very sexual, why not make the album with actual sexual sounds? It seemed like a very logical progression.”

Of course, should one ever have recourse to spend more than 30 seconds thinking about it, one would presume that an album made exclusively from sex sounds would be quite percussive and rhythmic: starting off slowly, maybe, going through a couple of tempo changes and ending with a Christ-almighty, arms-flailing, head-banging wig-out — basically Bohemian Rhapsody, but with squeaky bedsprings and the odd “Blimey!”. The Sex Album, however, falls into the genre category of “ambient”. It’s a hazy, drifty album, with sounds fading in and out and the odd spoken-word passage looming out of the mist, like HAL’s woozy monologues in 2001. Shagwise, The Sex Album would fulfil the soundtrack needs of two flu-struck invalids so off their faces on Benadryl that they keep passing out mid-coitus. There is, let us be clear, no “Mamma mia, mamma mia, let me go!” action here.

What The Sex Album is great for, however, is sample-spotting. On an album constructed entirely of sex noises, there are hours of fun to be had trying to guess what it is you are listening to. Or, more accurately, where you’re listening to. Is that “thwack” sound, in some way, a penis? Or is it just a bottom? More pressingly than that, how, exactly, did Vale use microphones on people having sex? I’m imagining those huge, furry boom microphones that look like a guinea pig on a stick being lowered slowly towards a nervously copulating couple.

“Well, we used quite a few internal microphones, as well, to pick up, erm, shifts of internal fluids. They made sounds that were useful for layering.” OK, now I’m imagining you using a microphone like the one Terry Wogan had on Blankety Blank in the Eighties.

“Well, we actually used miniature electret condenser mics,” Vale explains. “We also used external mics to pick up heartbeats, which worked as drum sounds. But it wasn’t just actual sex sounds we used — we also used sex toys, and I can tell you that the Rampant Rabbit vibrator is quite a versatile instrument. It has five or six different settings and revolving beads inside.”

Of course, Vale is by no means the first person to record using unusual samples. In the mainstream, S­Xpress’s S-Xpress used an aerosol for the hi-hat sound, while Mantronix turned the sound of a baby crying into a hi-hat pattern. But the further out of the charts you go, the odder the sampling becomes — the DJ and boundary-mangler Matthew Herbert’s recorded oeuvre includes The Mechanics of Destruction, on which Herbert destroys Starbucks coffee cups, Nike trainers and McDonald’s Styrofoam wrappers, and Bodily Functions, which is fairly self-explanatory. Matmos, meanwhile, have sampled “amplified crayfish nerve tissue”.

“These kinds of samples are a very difficult way of going about music,” Vale admits ruefully. “When you’ve just had to encourage a couple to do the fourteenth take of a particularly good moan, you do start wishing you could just go into a shop and buy a guitar instead.”

So what next for Vale? Do you have a reflective ciggie and then have a go at Sex 2: Second Wind?

“I think that for the immediate future I’d like to steer clear of sex,” Vale says ruefully. “It has been a very long, involving procedure. I wouldn’t rule out a sequel in the future, though.” And what, do you think, inspired your interest in making such sexual music?

“Well, when I was nine or ten, I was really into Samatha Fox’s Touch Me,” Vale says, unexpectedly. “Until my parents found out, and went mad and took the tape away. But that was a pretty neat song.”

• The Sex Album is available from www.thesexalbum.com