BEN FOLDS AND YMUSIC

Brighton Dome Concert Hall, Church Street, June 22

Tickets £27.50-£37.50, starts 8pm, call 01273 709709

BEN FOLDS has been playing piano since the age of nine. It shows in the work of a man who turns 50 in September and who, after a distinguished career in varying leftfield indie rock circles, has written an album that blends classical music with contemporary rockier arrangements to produce "chamber rock". Fear not, though; it sounds good.

What would a young Ben Folds think of his music now?

"I think I've made the music I wanted to hear then," Folds tells The Guide. "A lot of times, especially when I was younger, I would think, if I wanted a particular record, what would I buy? When I couldn't find it I would have thought, 'Oh I had better make that record myself.' The record I've just made is that kind of record."

The album, called So There, sees Folds team up with yMusic, a sextet of modern classical musicians who Folds says "think like a rock band".

He says, "I'm really lucky to be working with what would be one of the best chamber sextets in the world, who are also young and think like a rock band.

"I don't like too much formality in making music. I have been playing with orchestras a lot over the past ten years and have found the more their musicality is humanised the more they are seen as humans rather than reading machines.

"For rock musicians it seems really important for our ego to be backed up by stuffy orchestras so I'm really enjoying the informality of it."

The music even led website Drowned In Sound to ask itself why music hadn't always sound like this new record.

Folds reflects back on The Ben Folds Five (actually a three-piece), which was alive between 1993 and 2013, comprising largely of Folds on piano with Robert Sledge on bass and Darren Jessee on drums.

Folds says, "People asked me why no one had made piano, bass and drums as rock music when Ben Folds Five started and the cocky answer is it's hard to do."

He says he doesn't really think about how or why his music comes out a certain way, adding, "I enjoy turning my brain on after it's done. While I'm doing it I have no idea."

It was only a matter of time before Folds went down his current path.

He says, "With Ben Folds Five the other two were constantly restraining me on orchestration. On the first record I had all these string arrangements and I wanted to stack the sound up, but I had the other two saying, 'Na na na na na.' You have a real love/hate relationship where you like the structure of being in a band but you hate not knowing [what it could have sounded like].

"So I took the ideas and went away with them.

"When I got back with Rob and Darren for the album The Sound Of The Life Of The Mind [during the band's third spell 2011-2013] I felt like we had all matured and got along well in the studio. I think we made one of our best records but, y'know, it's probably not the record people wanted to hear."

His latest effort with yMusic has free licence, absorbing elements of film music with hints of showtime and jazz, but still sounds digestible, with the song I'm Not The Man carrying potent lyrics with it.

"I wasn't going to put any lyrics with the album," he reveals, explaining how I'm Not The Man is about being asked to make music for a film but also doubles as a message about defining yourself artistically.

On the merging of influences, Folds adds, "When you give yourself certain ingredients and tools and lock yourself in a room, you will figure out how you are going to express what sounds right and what's working for you.

"There are things we really like to hear. For instance, a rock band likes a power chord - we love a power chord.

"When you think about these things and take the instrument away and have a brass section instead, what is our power chord? We started discovering gestures we didn't anticipate and found out they were, in a sense, our power chord.

"Every time I make a record I really consider it being my last one. If you consider it being over, you can be sad about the record you didn't make and then make the right one."