In recent years there’s been no shortage of classical/electronica crossovers. Although well intentioned, the problem with many of them is that they sound like just that: ‘crossovers’, an affected welding of one artform on to another, like a digital watch sellotaped on to a Ming vase. I can’t think of much higher praise for Ketan Bhatti’s ‘Nodding Terms’, then, than to say that it really doesn’t sound like a crossover at all. Throughout its nine genre-swerving pieces, performed with clarity and verve by Ensemble Adapter, all component elements mesh naturally. Drawing on electronica and jazz, this is contemporary classical that is innovative and most enjoyable.

Bhatti’s usual metier is electronic music and ‘Nodding Terms’ most impresses in its complex rhythms. The opening of Funkstoff features abrupt Stravinsky-style interpolations of varying instrumental subgroups in different time signatures. Bass guitar, clarinet and percussion stabs give way to resonant harp chords, before switching back again. Rhythmic pyrotechnics aside, there’s deft handling of pacing, dynamics and contrast. Laughter Leading, a standout track, shudders back and forth with chop-and-change time signatures and long melodies moving around a fixed tonal centre in semitones and octatonic shards.

Where the tempo is slower, the music is no less carefully crafted. There are moments of quiet beauty, such as the jazzy flute-led theme of Kords. Ferntendenz features the umbral colours of gong, cello and bass clarinet; as the piece picks up, the harp quivers on one note, Morse code-style, as the drum kit slowly slips in and out of a regular metre. Over time, the music returns to regular patterns: a penchant for the 7/8 time signature, say, and for the use of harp to create punctuations in the polyphonic texture.

Bhatti composed these pieces specifically for Ensemble Adapter, who revel in the bringing the music to life. It’s another impressive recording following Adapter’s lively recent Kairos disc of Donatoni chamber works.