Watch Adem Ilhan's cover of Johnny Cash's Walk the Line

Adem Ilhan is deaf in one ear. Not unusual in itself, you might think, but tricky when you make a living playing cowbells and acoustic guitar, and your home is a hospital for broken instruments. But he doesn’t let any of it hold him back. “I’m lucky. I can pick up anything and get a tune out of it,” he says. “The only upsetting thing is that I never hear anything in stereo.”

His ear is perfect - as anyone who has heard his melodic take on alt-folk will attest. It is the nerve pathway to the brain that doesn’t work: “It’s like a cut telephone wire. And it has practical implications: when I’m mixing, I can only be approximate. But I’m surrounded by intensely talented ears.”

One pair of these belongs to Kieran Hebden, Adem’s bandmate in Fridge, the postrock outfit that, along with Sam Jeffers, they put together at the Elliott School, in Putney, southwest London, alma mater to various members of Hot Chip, the Maccabees and So Solid Crew. The artist known as Adem played his first gig at 13, though his voracious musical appetite meant he had been at the piano keyboard since he was three.

His father, a Turkish pianist and music teacher, instilled in him the sense that “anything that makes a sound is an instrument: wine-glasses, the noise of birds. If I feel a singing saw is the way to get the sound I want in a song, then that’s going to be the right instrument”.

His solo aspirations were put on hold until he had completed a maths degree at Warwick - “Maths is deeply philosophical” - playing with Fridge all the while. Then, in 2004, with Hebden running a successful parallel career as the folktronica maestro Four Tet, Adem released his first album, Homesongs, at the age of 26, to huge critical acclaim. He had some reservations, however: “All three of us in Fridge have quite itchy feet. And I was making my own music, which I really wanted other people to hear. Is that egotistical? Those feelings made me wary, because I wasn’t sure I liked what that said about me.”

He needn’t have worried. Homesongs went down a storm - if you can use such a violent analogy for something so magically, sweetly melancholic. “Like a fresh-faced Neil Young confined to his bedroom,” said the magazine Jockey Slut. But that doesn’t really give a sense of the depth of the acoustic meditations, the sheer gorgeous-ness of the harmonies and the splendidly weird collection of found instruments on the album. Was he as lonely and lovelorn as his music suggested? “I’m all about love, me,” he says wryly. “But no, I’m not bereft, I’m deeply in love. There’s a loss in the music, but there’s always a twist of hope, too. I think those feelings are something we all share.”

That sense of inclusivity led to him setting up the annual Homefires festival in 2004, a central-London weekender that showcases the best in leftfield “quiet” music, with gently stellar performers including Beth Orton, Bat for Lashes, Jose Gonzalez and Joanna Newsom. He is quick to reject the label that the warm folkiness of this event suggests, however.

“Nu-folk is such a weird, broad term, and I don’t think it’s right for me. Folk is not where I come from. This whole business that it’s not folk unless it’s passed through a thousand mouths ... I have no time for that sort of exclusive purism.”

It is exactly this idea of the broad church, “of changing and pushing ideas forward, showing your influences”, that has inspired his latest project, Takes, an album of indie covers from 1991 to 2001, a decade he describes as his “growing-up period, musically”. It is the first of three solo albums that he has recorded outside his warehouse flat in east London - or the “werehome”, as he refers to its nocturnal transformation (“house by day, studio by night”). He still plays all the instruments himself, though, a process he began on Homesongs because it was “quicker and easier than explaining to someone else what I wanted. Does that make me a control freak? Possibly”.

How did he choose a collection of tracks that ranges from the Breeders to dEUS, from Smashing Pumpkins to Björk? “The 1990s were really important to me. It’s when I was going to gigs. And these are my heroes. It was incredibly daunting to think they were going to listen to my takes and tell me what they thought.” Aphex Twin, “notorious for not giving his opinion”, gave the combination of To Cure a Weakling Child and Boy/Girl Song the thumbs-up, but Billy Corgan proved rather more difficult to squeeze for his opinion on Starla, “currently” Adem’s favourite song on the album. The resulting 12 Takes are, for the most part, brilliantly achieved, with PJ Harvey’s Oh My Lover taking on an unexpected softness and Yo La Tengo’s Tears Are in Your Eyes devastating in its stripped-down simplicity.

“I wanted to get to the gory guts of the songs, tear everything down, then build them up from the root,” Adem says. “I’d turn up at the studio with a sheet of paper with the lyrics written out as I remembered them, the chords in my head, and that was it. I’d record guitar and vocals, then think, ‘What does it need next? Double bass. Okay, then what? Glockenspiel.’ It would just grow on the spot.”

Sorry, did he just say “glockenspiel”? The werehome is strewn with similarly unrock’n’roll, broken-down instruments that Adem has rescued from car-boot sales and auction sites. “I scour flea markets looking for these sorry old things I can look after. I coax the breath back into them - always gently.” Cowbells, a vibraphone, two harmoniums, an Autoharp, a toy piano - they’re all in there, on Takes, if you listen hard enough.

“I just want to keep on changing the way I do things,” Adem says. “I hope that won’t disappoint.”

Takes is out tomorrow on Domino; Adem starts a short tour on May 20; www.adem.tv

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