When Kiran Leonard started work on Grapefruit – his forthcoming follow–up to critically acclaimed official debut Bowler Hat Soup – the biggest change he made was to move rooms.

“It’s recorded in the same house, but in a room with a higher roof so the sound is better,” he says, admitting he essentially commandeered the main living space for sessions between revising for his A Levels.

“I usually put out about six or seven releases a year – most are live recordings or EPs so it’s not as much work as it sounds. I’m not absent without any releases for too long.”

The 18–year–old, who is coming to Brighton for the first time courtesy of city promoters Teen Creeps, was signed to indie label Hand Of Glory after initially releasing Bowler Hat Soup as a free download.

The remixed album release combines found percussion with cabaret–style piano and Leonard’s own characterful voice for an idiosyncratic selection of songs which are closer to the experimental style of Frank Zappa, Vivian Stanshall and Beth Jeans Houghton than fellow Mancunians Doves and Elbow.

The calling card is the two–minute Dear Lincoln – which launches into life with an unforgettable plinking piano line and a breathless stream–of–consciousness lyric punctuated by handclaps and cymbals before an abrupt staccato chorus.

With the song break–down towards the end of the second minute there are more ideas going on than some bands achieve in one side of vinyl.

Perhaps this piling up of ideas is down to Leonard’s geographical isolation growing up in Saddleworth.

“It’s as far out of Greater Manchester as you can get before it becomes West Yorkshire,” he says, admitting the album was made in isolation in the geographic sense.

“There are more people I linked with over the internet – I was more closely aligned to the musical community in the US and other parts of England than Manchester.”

Since December he has been working with his own touring band. Divested of the multiple overdubs he created for the record the live versions of the songs have changed in character.

“I show them how I would play something and then they do whatever they want,” he says. “Everyone adds their own thing – I’m probably the least disciplined musician out of the four of us.

“The stylistic change comes from being limited to four musicians rather than loads of overdubs. When you take it down to four people that diversity is subtracted, and you have to add brute force and make everything louder to replace it.”

He puts his idiosyncratic writing style and use of sound down to both practicality and a film he saw of John Cage performing Water Walk on What’s My Line style show I’ve Got A Secret from the 1950s using instruments including a grand piano, iron pipe, five radios and a bathtub.

“He is walking around with a stopwatch triggering physical objects to create sounds,” says Leonard. “I thought it was amazing.

“I made a lot of percussion using saucepans and sandpaper – although more than anything it was because I didn’t have a cowbell or cabasa, so I had to make something up which sounded like them. A piece of wood rubbed with sandpaper or bristled brushes creates a cabasa sound.”

Grapefruit will see him experiment with longer songs after the two–minute epics of the last album – one track he currently performs live Don’t Make Friends With Good People clocks in at eight minutes.

“I still have an 80–minute limit on the way I work,” he says. “I want to put out a record that will fit on a CD, or splits neatly onto two CDs. I guess it’s just the way my head works.”