This isn't a Mass, and it doesn't use drones in any familiar way. Nor is it Reichian ‘music as process’. When an instrument goes out of phase, it does so almost randomly. Instead of all these, Jóhann Jóhannsson builds an extraordinary electro-acoustic work that examines the poetic resonance of apparently chance juxtapositions: ancient (including vowel-laden Coptic) texts and modern software, the eye of God and the surveilling drone (the word exists in that other, more sinister sense). The performances, though they belong to no familiar school or practice, are impeccable. Jóhannsson has written an oratorio for the modern world that also reaches back to the beginnings of human time and forward into an unseeable but daunting future, which Jóhannsson, who died suddenly in 2018, did not live to watch unfold.

Deutsche Grammophon ★★★★