Mark Barden’s music pursues a forensic exploration of the instrumental body. In live performance, this can give a theatrical air as the performer fashions unrecognisable micro-sonorities. On disc, it tends to an acousmatic air, the difficulty of identifying the instruments affording us imaginative free rein.

The opening section of aMass for ensemble sees an amplified string trio drift through intense, brooding noise textures with fine gradations (performed with precision by Ensemble Mosaik). Sounds flow near-continuously, until a second trio joins (percussion, piano, electric guitar), then the remaining instruments, building to a wonderful Varèsean climax in an organised-sound paroxysm. It’s a sound palette often heard these days (post-Lachenmann/Czernowin noise) but Barden explores the idiom exceptionally well, and indeed distinctively.

A few of the works here are duos. In personæ for bass flute and bass clarinet, most sounds are multiphonics or otherwise articulated with noise; the two wind instruments come to sound as biological creatures in interplay. Veil for two piccolo flutes is more agitated; set in quasi-heterophony, the wind instruments continually use techniques such as overblowing and flutter-tonguing to trace barely-there contours. cleft for violin and cello, 20 minutes long, reaches the verge of silence. Through techniques such as double-stops, glissandos and harmonics, brief textures fade in and out of nothingness. Here as elsewhere, the sound engineering is remarkable.

The three solo piano Études are more recognisable post-tonal fare. The standout is the third, ‘On Affect and Nostalgia’, which recomposes the discursive opening Sinfonia from Bach’s C minor Keyboard Partita using noise injections, clusters and erasures. The largest-scale work here, anatomy, is a single-movement concerto for solo percussion and orchestra. The forces are not in dialogue but in parallel with each other, timpani rolls and scattered tom patterns backlit by quiet ensemble sound blocks. anatomy reminds us how the body is at once the nearest and furthest thing from us, a strange terrain marked by unceasing multifarious forces.