BY HIS own admission, Max Richter is a wanderer.

Anglo-German by birth, the 50-year-old composer is currently based in Oxfordshire but has spent much of the last decade in Berlin and still splits his time between there and the UK. Otherwise he's travelling: touring with his ensemble, working on operas and ballets in places like London and Zurich, or applying his mixture of classical minimalism and stately electronica to scores for an array of international film-makers. Israeli animator Ari Folman, Australian Cate Shortland, Mumbai-born Ritesh Batra and Saudi Arabia's first female director, Haifaa Al-Mansour, are just four whose works he has scored. Elsewhere you'll find examples of his music in everything from Ridley Scott's Prometheus to Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island.

But everyone has somewhere they call home and for Richter it's Edinburgh. He studied at Edinburgh University in the 1980s, later moved back to the city to raise a family and all in all he has spent around a decade of his life in the Scottish capital.

“You can't really choose your home town, it's like falling in love,” he laughs. “And I just love being in Edinburgh. I feel welcome … I raised my kids there, they went to school there. I do think of it as my home town, honestly. I've always travelled a lot and I've never really lived anywhere but I lived longer in Edinburgh than I have anywhere else.”

Tuesday will see a homecoming of sorts, then, when Edinburgh welcomes Richter and his six-piece ensemble to the Usher Hall for the penultimate date on a six city tour of the UK and Ireland. It will be his second appearance in the capital in under a year, following last August's Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) performance of Recomposed, his “remix” of Antonio Vivaldi's baroque favourite The Four Seasons.

This time Richter will be performing From Sleep, the 60 minute catnap version of the eight-hour piece he composed in collaboration with neuroscientist David Eagleman and premiered on BBC Radio 3 last autumn. Called Sleep, it was broadcast live from London's Wellcome Collection in a performance which began at midnight on September 27 and ran until breakfast. It was the longest continual performance in the history of the station.

Richter has performed the full piece three times since (each time in Berlin) and has two more performances scheduled for Sydney next month, which will probably be enough for the time being. While the audience members are invited to sleep, doze or stay awake during the performance as they wish, it's a punishing night-shift for Richter and his musicians.

“It is pretty heavy,” he admits. “You can't do anything else if you're playing Sleep. You can't. You basically come off stage and get into bed, get out of bed and go onto the stage. It's like that. It's really physically hard.”

From Sleep is more than just a condensed version of Sleep, however. While Richter likens the second to “a big pause in your daily life”, he sees the first as “more like a daydreaming space”.

“It's about contemplation. I think of it like a dialogue with the listener. Rather than monopolising the consciousness with loads of data, loads of music, it's kind of a low information zone. A space to reflect. That's how I see the shorter version. There is some shared material between them but there's lot of things which are in one and not in the other at all.”

Also on the programme in Edinburgh is a rare performance of an early work, The Blue Notebooks, inspired by the journals of Franz Kafka and the work of Polish poet Czes?aw Mi?osz. It was recorded in three hours in 2004 for just £500, with most of the money being used to hire a string section. We can assume, then, that the participation of Tilda Swinton as narrator was undertaken as a favour (actress Sarah Sutcliffe reads Swinton's part on tour).

For Richter, now held up as one of the pre-eminent composers of his generation, the decision to perform The Blue Notebooks is more than just a whim. As with the inclusion in his EIF show of Memoryhouse, an even older piece, it's a way of reminding himself that while popular now, his trailblazing collage of minimalism, conservatoire classicism, art rock, found sound and under-stated electronica had to struggle to find its place. Memoryhouse may have been re-issued on vinyl two years ago and the piece hailed as a classic, but when it was first released in 2002, he notes, it received no reviews and lasted only six months before it was deleted and the record label closed.

“At the time I thought: 'Well it's disappointing but in a way it means I can keep on doing what I'm doing and no-one will know. Because no-one's listening there's nothing to be afraid of. Nobody's going to hear this stuff'. So I went into The Blue Notebooks very much with that frame of mind.”

Both it and Memoryhouse were “shots in the dark,” he adds. “Really, nobody was doing this sort of work, this sort of hybrid of written-down music, electronic music and post-rock. It didn't really exist. So when I started playing it [The Blue Notebooks] again I felt pleased that I had been bloody minded enough to make a second record.”

And how does the piece shape up after 12 years on the shelf?

“It has been really interesting to re-encounter it not quite from the point of view of a listener, but with something of that objectivity about it,” he says. “The main thing that I have taken away from playing it again is that I'm glad I didn't give up.”

Born in Hamelin in Lower Saxony in 1966, Richter grew up in Bedford and, after studying piano and composition in Edinburgh, won a place at the Royal College of Music in London. He later studied in Florence with Italian avant garde colossus Luciano Berio, whose other notable pupils include classical chart-topper Ludovico Einaudi.

In 1989 Richter co-founded keyboard ensemble Piano Circus but by the mid-1990s he was moonlighting with pioneering electronic acts such as Future Sound Of London (FSOL) and future Mercury Prize-winners Reprazent, led by drum and bass luminary Roni Size.

“As a university- and conservatoire-trained composer, I was all about information, notes on the page, structure, musical architecture, planning. It's a very conceptual way of thinking about making music. But Future Sound and Roni Size were all about feeling. They were all about making sounds tells a story in feelings. It almost comes from the opposite starting point and that was a fantastically liberating experience - let's just forget about the notes and make colours which tell a story”.

The experience also brought Richter back into contact with a passion of his early teenage years - electronics.

“I built my first synthesiser with a soldering iron when I was 13, having heard Kraftwerk and early electronic music,” he says. “I became so obsessed with it that I had to get busy in my bedroom with bags of components. It was the sound: you can't make those sounds with acoustic instruments. You just can't. They're new.”

Working with FSOL and Roni Size gave him “permission”, as he puts it, to reconnect with all this. The result was a revelation.

“Being more involved with electronic music from that perspective made me realise how I could incorporate it into the things I was doing. That hybrid language, which you get on The Blue Notebooks, really comes from those two things coming together.”

Today, Richter stands in the vanguard of a neoclassical movement which adheres to the disciplines and principles of classical music, but which views Mogwai and Mahler, say, as influences with equal weight. It draws on populist forms like rock and dance music. It pays tribute to the efforts of previous cross-breeders such as Brian Eno, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. It is constantly and energetically collaborative - Richter has worked with people like Robert Wyatt, choreographer Wayne McGregor and Black Watch director John Tiffany - and it is hungry for technological adventure: Richter's forensic dissection of Vivaldi's Four Seasons was preceded in 2008 by 24 Postcards In Full Colour, in which audience members' phones played back two dozen new ringtones Richter had devised. “There were hundreds of millions of little loudspeakers around the world playing back mostly really bad noises,” he explains. “I felt that was a waste, so why not open it up as a sort of curated performance space? That was the ambition, typically a little far-fetched maybe!”

Far-fetched or not it underlines Richter's ability to match his musical talent with a questioning mind which views as fair game everything from ring tones to neuroscience. In that regard he's as much wonderer as wanderer. And besides, when was grandiose ambition ever a bad thing?

The Max Richter Ensemble is at the Usher Hall Edinburgh on Tuesday (7.30pm)