‘Entertainment’ is, of course, a problematic word in the context of ‘serious’ modern composition, so let me explain what I mean. Aperghis was born in Athens but has spent most of his adult life in France. His wife is Édith Scob, the actress famous for her role in 1950s schlock horror art flick Eyes Without a Face, and Aperghis’s music thrives in that same fantasy world of magic realism: the world of Jacques Tati and Marcel Marceau; serious whimsy, very serious questions asked about the nature of musical language.

Simulacre II (1994) for voice, marimba, percussion and bass clarinet illuminates the Aperghis code most clearly, as he unpacks ideas about the most fundamental concept of chamber-playing – how musicians listen. Players introduce themselves with an unaccompanied solo. ‘Simulacre’ because these solos are then combined in all possible instrumental permutations, and having learnt the material one way, the musicians need to bend towards each new passing context; the nitty-gritty necessaries of how the vocal line moves from bass clarinet to marimba are balanced and coloured. Heightened listening; remembering what went before as you play in the now.

As deadpan as stone as they redistribute the constituent parts, Valérie Philippin, Ludovic Montet and Aurélie Pichon reveal how cunningly fit for purpose Aperghis’s material is. Diced up syllables, open vowel sounds and phonemes are mulched together, creating a fantasy language rich in inference and suggestion, utterance remodelled from first principles like a Marcel Marceau mime. With Aperghis’s gestures defining their own narrative, he has licence to reorder and filter them as he pleases.

The disc begins with Philippin’s recitation of Calme – giggly, breathless, cartoon vocal soliloquies – and climaxes with the hallucinogenic microtonal patois of Fidélité for voice and harp.