When Martin Boyce phones to arrange our meeting to discuss his exhibition at Tramway, he explains he has been busy in the

studio. Not that unusual, one might assume, for a prominent visual artist on the eve of his first solo show in Scotland since 1999, but Boyce is talking about The Foundry, a recording studio in Maryhill, where he has been working with leading British jazz musician Raymond Macdonald.

The collaboration comes when both men are riding high. Macdonald has recently made an album with legendary free saxophonist Lol Coxhill and in August he worked with David Byrne on the soundtrack of the film Young Adam, which stars Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton, and will premiere in Cannes next year.

Boyce, at 35 one of that generation of Glasgow School of Art-trained artists who are lauded in places such as Cologne as much as in their home city, has just opened his most prestigious show: 1959 Capital Avenue, the opening exhibition under a new directorship at Frankfurt's Museum of Modern Art. He has also, with Graham Fagen and Martin Boyce, received a visual artist award of (pounds) 15,000 from the Scottish Arts Council. Hamilton-born Boyce, who was short-listed for the first Becks Futures prize in 2000, is unfazed by his international

success. ''Every situation that comes,'' he says, ''you feel kind of ready for it. It's been a steady trajectory.'' Much of his sanguine attitude comes from the support of his peer group and the keen interest of the international institutions he has worked with in recent years. ''You achieve a certain amount of confidence when other people place confidence in you.''

I meet Boyce and Macdonald at Tramway where the former's show, Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours, is taking shape. It takes its title from a New Order lyric and Boyce even describes this work with a musical reference to the legendary, now defunct, Manchester night-club, The Hacienda, as we walk around the enormous installation which has created a whole exterior landscape within the gallery space. ''It has a bit of that kind of industrial hardness to it,'' he explains, ''with the painted colours and the steel.''

It seems, therefore, fitting that Tramway has provided an opportunity for the Glasgow-based artist - who freely admits he doesn't play a note himself - to work with a musician and finally engage in a long-proposed collaboration with Macdonald, one of Scotland's most adventurous improvisers and an exponent of what has been described as ''lop-sided beauty''.

Lop-sided beauty might equally apply to Boyce's art, which has taken some of the icons of fifties' design - the graphics of Saul Bass, say, or the furniture of designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, or Arne Jacobsen - and tilted them towards something more sinister, producing objects, architectural installations, and wall paintings that conjure up a sense of both elegance and dislocation. Boyce's work has often projected a sophisticated urban nightmare, where stark beauty and slick graphics provoke not only pleasure but also the distinct chill of paranoia.

If much of his art evokes fifties'

idealism grown sour, the new show courts a feeling that is much more bittersweet. The large space has been transformed into an evocation of a city park at night, sketched out by key sculptural elements: chain-link fencing, scattered benches made from painted tubular steel, and eerie stick-like trees suspended from the ceiling. This is a place you might drift into in your dreams. A kind of half-remembered children's play park, which might be taken over at night by drinking adolescents or lovers.

Intermittently, the lighting dims as a digital animation is projected on to the wall and Macdonald's haunting soundscape fills the gallery. ''The atmosphere is more romantic and poetic,'' Boyce says, a change in the tone of his work that has been attributed by some to the recent birth of the artist's second child. ''But it's certainly not sunny. I think it's kind of melancholy, conjuring up a kind of mythical, teenage space.''

The piece certainly has a strong whiff of nostalgia, but it is tempered by an ambiguous dream-like quality both in its visual impact and in

Macdonald's looping, nocturnal soundtrack.

''It really was improvised,'' Macdonald explains. ''Collaboration like this can be really exhilarating for me, whether it's with an artist or a film-maker. In that way you kind of leave a lot of the baggage that comes with jazz music behind. Usually you're expected to conform to certain kind of standards and harmonic structures, but working like this is very open and exciting.''

For Boyce, there's a parallel with his own work, which for all its apparent seamlessness includes key decisions made at the last minute. ''Things get broken or chipped or fall over,'' he says. ''You have to make decisions about how you work with that. It's not like everything in my art is prefabricated months beforehand and unwrapped and suddenly there you are.''

Martin Boyce, Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours, opens at Tramway today and continues until January 19.