These days every singer-songwriter worth their "folktronica" tag is teaming an acoustic guitar with a laptop. But Dublin's David Kitt was one of the first. Full of soft guitars and ambient electronica, his 2000 Rough Trade debut Small Moments sounded like a cross between Nick Drake and Durutti Column.

Now he has taken the title for his current tour, Guitars and Other Machines, from one of the latter's records and is promoting an album, October's Not Fade Away, which is his most eclectic to date.

"It is shamefully nerdy," he says of his laptop dealings. "It's just I realised I needed to get to the point with electronics and programming and computer stuff where it was more or less as easy as picking up an acoustic guitar. Otherwise you get what I call gumption drainage', where you're struggling through a technological minefield for hours on end and lose the impetus for the idea.

"I think I'm learning, in my own idiosyncratic way. Now when I sit down something really happens, in the same magical way it would with a real instrument."

The tour title may be a little misleading - the "other machines" basically refers to a laptop and trumpet - but you can certainly expect to hear the more electronica-based side of Kitt's repertoire. At the moment, he tells me, he has no less than four different projects under way, one falling "near the poppier end of Warp", another wholly instrumental and influenced by the sounds of Detroit.

"This frees me up, when I go back to my conventional stuff, to just do the songs and enjoy them for what they are rather than trying to put all these other influences into it as well," he says.

Although he has toured the UK with the likes of Tindersticks and Mercury Rev, and enjoyed critical success with all five albums, Kitt has never achieved the same status here as back home.

In Ireland he is regularly nominated for awards and saw his third record, Square One, stay at number one for three weeks. In the UK, probably because of the variety in his music, he has never followed all those guys with guitars into the mainstream.

"I think my Irishness is massively important to my songwriting," he says. "There's a cadence and a flow to the way Irish people use the English language. English can be quite formal and straight - if you take even basic greetings, in Irish there are much longer ways to hello and to say goodbye.

"I also grew up with a lot of traditional Irish music, which is very pulse driven and four to the floor - it's very close to techno if you break it down. What I've been doing recently, which sounds so dodgy when I say it, is programming along the lines of Irish traditional tunes. But it doesn't come out sounding like Afro Celt bloody Soundsystem."

Full of unabashed guitar-pop, Kitt's last record, Square One, was said to be a soundtrack to its author falling in love. Actually, Kitt now reveals he only said that "to avoid hurting the girl I was with at the time: at least five of the songs were about different women".

Not Fade Away is definitely, however, a soundtrack to the break-up of said relationship - and was far easier to write as a result.

"I find it easier to write songs when I'm not in a relationship," he says. "Now I'm single, I've been more productive in the past six months than I was in the last six years."