“I hope there exists, in all countries, a core of people who think that music is a very meaningful activity, which has something to do with the wondrous, extraordinary fact of being alive at all, that has something profound to say about the space between life and death.”

If you can distil an artistic career that stretches well over forty years into a nice little quote, these gushing, heartfelt sentiments from the man himself are apt for Robin Williamson. Of course, most will recognise his name from the wonderful, poetic, mystical folk of the Incredible String Band, a band who affected generations that followed them, and even in this age of weird/nu/acid/freak-folk still sound not so much ahead of their time, but outside of time itself.

Perhaps only Animal Collective with their childlike electronica are comparable of contemporary acts, but even that is tenuous.

In the 70s Williamson headed up The Merry Band, who enjoyed a healthy following in America. In the 80s he immersed himself in folk storytelling and other aspects of traditional performance, while in the past decade he has collaborated with his wife Bina to create music that, he says, “has a lot of the early String Band in it”. Then there are all his solo albums.

Now at the age of 64, he is still busy exploring the “space between life and death”, with him just having completed a 22-date storytelling tour and organising the re-release of the 1975 Merry Band album Journey’s End, not to mention the fact he contributed songs to the recent Juliette Binoche film L’Heure d’ete.

Williamson is on the phone from Cardiff, where he and Bina live, and where he has the headquarters of his own label, Pigs Whisker Music. Unlike fellow Scottish folk pioneer Bert Jansch, he retains a thick Edinburgh accent, undimmed by decades of world travel. Williamson and Jansch shared a flat in the city in the years before Jansch went to seek his fortune in London, and Williamson teamed up with Clive Palmer and then Mike Heron to form the Incredible String Band.

The story of this unfathomable band remains fascinating, and like so many groups of the 60s folk revival, has producer, impresario and writer Joe Boyd (“one of the pioneers of multi-track recording”) at the heart of it.

“In those days people were still looking for things that were highly unusual,” says Williamson. “Around 1970 music began firmly to look for things that fitted some sort of genre. But in 1965 when we first bumped into Joe Boyd, I think he’d just arrived in Britain as a scout for Elektra, and he was looking for something unusual. We were that because we were using an American string band style format with banjo, fiddle and guitar, but writing original music, and the music was getting quite idiosyncratic because we were trying to draw on subject matter other than boy-meets-girl. We tried to write songs about childhood or dreams, things like that.”

With their psychedelic clothes and colourful album covers, the Incredible String Band (trimmed to just Williamson and Heron following their eponymous debut album in 1966) slotted neatly into the periphery of the counterculture movement.

That said, ISB never held much of a reputation for extensive dabbling in hallucinogens, though Williamson certainly had familiar reference points… “I though of myself as a beatnik originally, Jack Kerouac was my hero when I was 16.”

Now, ISB are held up as a visual and musical symbol of that era, both by appreciators and detractors, something Williamson is ok with. They did, after all, play Woodstock, though Williamson still bemoans the hardships of camping and the fact rain dictated they had to wait until the Saturday afternoon, rather than the scheduled Friday night, to perform.

“The hippy movement fitted like a glove,” he says. “I’m very proud of a lot of the things that represented, some wonderful things came out of the 60s. Including the word ‘ecology’”.

This was arguably the last time Williamson was part of a contemporary movement. For the last two decades and more he has dedicated himself to reinvigorating the lost art of folk storytelling. As well as extensive touring with his storytelling show accompanied by his beloved harp, he has authored three books and is even Honorary Chief Bard of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids.

The Incredible String Band’s lyrics have often been described as inspired by the Romantic poets, given the natural imagery and metaphysical themes, and indeed the written word has always been a part of Williamson’s art. In 2006 he released The Iron Stone, an album that combined his own words with those of Dylan Thomas, William Blake and Walt Whitman. When it comes down to it though, Williamson is a beat at heart, and that movement is the reason he started storytelling in the first place.

“I always liked Jack Kerouac,” he says, “so I found myself looking for the things he liked and came to William Blake, and looking for the things he liked I found myself back with druids and bardic heritage and Celtic people and their stories, all of which have a magical or spiritual element, even the most simple stories.

“And a big part of the Celtic stories is the harp, and I thought nobody else was doing the oral literature of Scotland, Ireland and Wales and no one is trying to perform this music, which has been on the page since the middle ages.”

In keeping with the geographically diverse nature of the stories, Williamson and his wife now make a point of touring to obscure, sparsely populated parts of the United Kingdom.

On his most recent tour he ventured to untrodden destinations (as far as touring is concerned), as Caerleon, Farringford, Hexham and Fishguard. “It’s important to reach an audience that wants to hear that sort of concert, we try to go as far away from anything resembling cabaret as possible.”

There were two more questions left to ask him, the first being about his relationship with his old band, now cited by artists from Devendra Banhart, Espers and other artists in this so-called new age of folk, as a central influence.

Williamson is delighted, of course, at new generations taking their cue from ISB, and seems comfortable and proud at their legacy. He and Heron remain close friends (though Williamson was not part of Heron’s revival of the band name of the 90s and early 00s), while admitting “it’s impossible to go back to days of bygones, you’re not the same person you were when you were 20 years old.” A reunion seems unlikely, and indeed unnecessary.

Robin Williamson plays The Green Note on 31 August 2008.