The daffodils have been flattened by the “worst storm of winter” when I arrive at Hall Farm, near Bury St Edmunds. It’s not the most obvious place to go looking for an experimental Finnish accordionist, but that’s who I’ve come to meet. Kimmo Pohjonen (“Kee-mo Poh-yo-nen”) is holed up in a large barn, surrounded by more than a dozen vintage tractors. Inside, the rain is just a soft rattle on the roof and the air is thick with paraffin and diesel fumes. A vaguely elfin figure with the ghost of a mohawk, Pohjonen hunches over a laptop resting on a chair, his twinkling blue-grey eyes flanked by big headphones and his face a mask of concentration.

“I like that sound - I like that sound a lot!” he shouts above the rumbling of a Massey Ferguson 35 tractor, which a farm hand, Brian Dale, is revving for him to record. Pohjonen is on the first day of a research trip to four British farms, collecting sounds for a series of Earth Machine Music performances. He will return in May with the processed results literally at his fingertips - tweaked, treated, looped and ready to be fed back out of his MIDI-fied accordion to the workers who have helped him to source the sounds and will join his improvised performances. On this initial visit, Pohjonen will also sample circular saws, heaters, milking machines, quad bikes, diggers, graders, even squealing piglets.

“It’s going to be really interesting,” he assures me. “Of course, all these concerts will be different; it’s four compositions, four stories of these farms. And I would like to see as many local people being part of it as possible.”

Despite the project’s outlandish nature, Pohjonen’s courteous and infectiously playful, inquisitive manner ensures he has had no trouble convincing the locals to cooperate. Coming from a small-town background, he is well aware that such rural communities don’t see much of the arts. But haven’t they heard enough farm machinery? “Yeah, but when you amplify and equalise those sounds, and you have a great PA, you can suddenly hear music and rhythms. I’m sure people who come to the concerts will be surprised at what great sounds they have. These are kind of forgotten sounds. Everybody knows them, and everybody knows accordion sounds, too - but not like this.”

Having played the accordion for 33 years, Pohjonen has long since abandoned his folk and classical training in a manic search for new sounds, which began when he was in a heavy-rock band in Finland in the early 1990s. “I couldn’t hear myself, and I was watching the guitarist using pedals and amplifiers. And the drummer was playing loud, so I thought, ‘Hey, I have to have the same elements.’ ” This led to the acclaimed solo shows he began in 1995. As much performance art as music, they feature amplified effects produced not just from the keys, but from the bellows and body of his accordion, alongside his own vocals. He samples these on stage, looping them into glowering walls of sound.

Pohjonen playfully dubs the Earth Machine Music tour “industrial agricultural music”. Of course, he is not the first artist to make music from unlikely sources – just the latest in a tradition that goes back as far as the early 20th century, to the French-born classical composer Edgard Varèse. His work, which often referenced the noise of the modern world, influenced artists such as Frank Zappa and Pink Floyd, who once tried to make an album called Household Objects.

Active since the 1970s, the “sound artist” Boyd Blake Rice has incorporated electric shoe-polishers and fans into his music; in the early 1980s, Germany’s Einstürzende Neubauten used cement mixers, vacuum cleaners and drills in theirs. As for contemporary artists, the shortlist for 2008’s PRS Foundation New Music Award - the British music industry’s answer to the Turner prize – includes Robert Jarvis’s ambitious “echolocation” installation at the London Wetland Centre, which employs a “choir” of bat calls. Then there is Austria’s Vegetable Orchestra, with carrot recorders, courgette trumpets and eggplant clappers. And farming equipment forms the basis of Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor’s Great Fences of Australia project, which involves playing fences with cello bows.

All well and good for readers of Wire magazine, but how will a bunch of farmers (both performers and audience) react to the kind of esoterica Pohjonen is planning? Having seen him diplomatically persuade complete strangers to work with him, I’d say the shows look like being - ahem - a roaring success.

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