LAST time I saw Adam Stafford play live, he was behind the wire mesh of a cage. It was 2015’s Hidden Door festival in Edinburgh – the volunteer-run arts pop-up that took place in a courtyard just off King’s Stables Road – and the Falkirk-based musician was skilfully looping layers of sound on top of each other in an upstairs bar, half of which looked as if it had been turned into a giant chicken coop.

The performance-art environment seemed to suit what Stafford was doing. There’s a formal creative craft to his music-making that’s fascinating to watch when done live, as his toe taps an effects pedal to record a guitar riff before he grasps the microphone to loop a beatbox-style rhythm while adding another scratchier guitar pattern to the mix. And then comes the voice – soulful, melodic, completely captivating – bringing human emotion to the technological process.

I sometimes wonder if the sheer cleverness of Stafford’s construction of his music doesn’t distract first-time audiences from how wonderfully catchy his songs are. Wouldn’t they switch on quicker if he just, you know, played with a band?

“I think maybe a band would take away the magical aspect of the performance of one person organically recording and sampling himself and then building that up,” he explains. “I don’t make any bones about it: it is a performance, almost like theatre.

“When writing, usually a song starts with a riff and then builds upon it in the practice room. I jam it out and pick the different components apart. And then, if it’s a loop-based song, I try to fit a vocal melody around the music. Once I get something that I like, the lyrics come last. I’ve tried writing lyrics then fitting them around music and it never works.”

Stafford was the main force in Falkirk group Y’All Is Fantasy Island between 2006 and 2010. He had put out solo material in the past, but it was the release of solo album Build A Harbour Immediately in 2011 that suggested he really did have something special to offer as a tech-savvy one-man-band. Its formula of experimentally crafted music put to the service of classic pop tunes was developed on 2013’s Imaginary Walls Collapse (a Scottish Album of the Year Award nominee) and now on Taser Revelations, due for release on March 14 on the Song, By Toad label.

There’s a track called Please on Imaginary Walls Collapse that, with its big reverb and plaintive vocal, sails close to Roy Orbison. On the new album, Phantom Billions, with its staccato guitar and a touch of steel drums, reminds me in a good way of The Police’s Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic (“that was the second song at my wedding,” Stafford admits). The climactic choral swell on closing track The Penumbra lifts me up like Elbow’s One Day Like This.

What I’m saying is this: Adam Stafford pushes the boat out in the way he constructs his songs but he never pushes away his listening audience.

However, unlike a certain influential music website, I wouldn’t go as far as to compare him to Ed Sheeran.

“That was a surprise,” he admits wryly. “I don’t mind the songs he did with Pharrell actually; they’re decent enough catchy tunes. But imagine if Ed Sheeran brought out something like Railway Trespassers; that would just be anathema.”

Ah, Railway Trespassers, the highlight of Taser Revelations, a seven-and-a-half-minute piece that lifts a snatch of dialogue from a banned public information film about kids playing on train tracks and places it within a composition that’s probably the closest Stafford has come to the US minimalism of Steve Reich. That songs can stimulate the head one minute and break the heart the next would be a triumph for any musician. Yet again, Adam Stafford has created one of the best albums of the year.

Adam Stafford launches Taser Revelations at Summerhall, Edinburgh on March 11, with further gigs in Inverness (17), Aberdeen (19) and Glasgow (20)