Many cultural events in Australia are preceded by a Welcome to Country, a short yet beautiful ceremony in which a respected member of the Aboriginal community welcomes the audience on to his or her traditional land. This live recording by Queensland-born William Barton, one of Australia’s greatest and most ambitious didjeridu exponents, is a long-distance Welcome to Country of sorts, evoking the unique grandeur of Australia’s landscape and its flora and fauna in original compositions that are modern and ancient, Western and Indigenous.

When you play the didjeridu – essentially a drone instrument but through vocalisations and rhythmic control of the breath capable of an infinite variety of mimetic and more abstract effects – your entire being vibrates with it. Thus are you connected with the universe. Barton’s genius is to connect song, percussion, bowed and plucked strings, as well as Western compositional techniques and improvisation, to erase any sense of a clash of cultures. There is only one universe and we’re all part of it.

You can hear it from the outset in the haunting title-track, Birdsong at Dusk, which opens the album, the wonderful Kurilpa Quartet evoking the waves outside the Queensland beach house where Barton wrote the work as his song rises like the seagulls above them, the didjeridu mediating between the two. You can hear it, too, in Delmae Barton’s soulful vocalises in Improvisation and Dreamtime Duet, violinist John Rodgers’s ethereal calligraphy in Didge Fusion and Barton’s pulsating rhythms in 7/8 Not Too Late. This is chamber music at its most primal and contemporary.