It takes a long time to find Yann Tiersen. I finally locate him after he’s played the final show on his current UK tour, a show that was incredibly powerful, featuring many voices, many instruments, many sounds. I’ve had the problem of trying to find Yann Tiersen before - earlier that day in fact. In the Cambridge Fopp record shop I track down his new album Dust Lane - where heavy songs start out bleak but evolve into vast, dusty, enthralling soundscapes – in the ‘world music’ section. He is not in ‘pop/rock’ where he would most like to be, nor filed under ‘soundtrack’ where he could easily fit, having written the dreamy, evocative soundtracks to Amelie and Good Bye, Lenin! To be in the world section implies Tiersen’s music would not be of interest to Arcade Fire or Nick Cave fans. This is daft. It’s worth the journey it might take you to find him and his music.

When I do find Yann Tiersen, lurking backstage after his performance, he doesn’t seem to want to do the interview. I can’t tell if this is shyness or boredom or arrogance, or all of that, but he quickly becomes chatty. He sees no resemblance between his music and Arcade Fire’s, but he is outraged by where he has been pigeonholed; "I think the worst place to be is in world music. I hope it’s just Cambridge." Sadly, it isn’t just Cambridge. Tiersen’s sound invokes what we’ve heard before and a lot of things we haven’t, very French sounding and yet opposed to the French, a soundtrack to everything and nothing like a soundtrack. Like most unclassifiable music from abroad it tends to be simplified as ‘world music’.

Tiersen is full of contradictions. I ask if he feels it important to be a French composer to which he wearily replies: "I am not fucking French, I hate French people, it is the worst country in the world." He is actually from Brittany. The first cities he visited were London, then Berlin; not Paris. London and Berlin seeped into his sensibility more than Paris ever has.

"When I started touring, France was like a foreign country to me," he says. Historically, French pop music is a disaster. Yann Tiersen did not want to make French pop, so paradoxically created a radical form of French music by rejecting his nationality, yet embracing its intellectual history; the likes of Sartre, Cocteau, Satie and Baudelaire.

I’m shocked to hear that he hates making soundtracks, as he’s fantastic at writing music for films. I’m even more shocked when Tiersen tells me he does not particularly care for Amelie, and wrote its music seven years before it hit the screen, not knowing it would become the (perfect) soundtrack. "It’s not easy for me to work with someone, especially for a movie. To create, I need to be on my own. When you make an album you are free, you can spend years on it. If you’re doing a soundtrack it is just for a short period of time, there is pressure." Tiersen mentions Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man as the only type of soundtrack he’d be even moderately interested in, where Neil Young improvises an electric guitar over the director’s self-dubbed "Acid Western". I ask if there is anyone he would like to collaborate with, but Yann Tiersen really does value privacy: "I’m really a big fan of the Velvet Underground but I’m pretty sure that Lou Reed is a big twat."

Despite liking to work alone, when he collaborates he reflects his personal taste in sound. On ‘Dust Lane’, Tiersen assembled an impressive band, including Dave Collingwood from Gravenhurst on drums and Matt Elliott – formally of Third Eye Foundation – contributing melancholy vocals.

The album is steeped in death and mourning, recorded during a time when he lost several of those closest to him. One of the most intriguing songs on the album, Chapter 19, reflects this theme with its lyrics being an excerpt from Henry Miller’s Sexus. "When I was a teenager, I lost my father. Miller became like a father figure, his books were very important and very special to me."

I went into the interview hoping he’d tell me about an unnamed movement of musicians that he belonged to, but instead found that he is not looking to be a part of any scene, and reaches not just to the past for inspiration but to what is around him. "It has always been my dream to construct. When you walk down the street and hear beautiful sounds – that is freedom. My goal is to try and reach that kind of freedom with random sounds and noises."

Perhaps this is because he’s a musician thinking not only philosophically but about the state of the world. "We are living in a strange time. With Cameron in the UK, Sarkozy in France, Berlusconi in Italy, these are strange, strange days. Music is quite abstract, but even so, those political things are all in the album, only subconsciously." What Tiersen has seemed to do in ‘Dust Lane’, is move away from film soundtracks in favour of a rich and powerful set of sounds that reflect life, death, love, magic, hope, sadness, fear, desire. He doesn’t want to sound French, but has an exotic and extreme sense of Frenchness.

When the interview is over I still feel as if I haven’t found Yann Tiersen, and I think I don’t really want to either. In finding Yann Tiersen, in boxing him into a genre, a movement, a country, he would not be Yann Tiersen any longer. I decide the best place to find him is in his music, where he is lost in his own world.