Drawing from numerous genres but free from many of their constrictions, the alt-classical-world-music-jazz pieces coming out of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and other like-minded groups are an evolving part of the international contemporary music landscape and warrant serious attention. Inevitably, listeners struggle to contextualise what they hear and these two rather different recordings by French-Lebanese composer/performer Layale Chaker are no exception. One must shut off the region of the brain that asks ‘What is it?’ A pop album whose songs may well be movements? And ones that encompass multiple collaborators? Each with an independent character but conceptually unified – like Má vlast?

Whatever. Upon receiving sound files for Vigil, the collaboration between Chaker and the ETHEL string quartet, I was immediately captivated. This chamber work’s subtextual purpose wasn’t clear, but did it need to be with music of such strong powers of suggestion? The recording’s 10 tone poems (for lack of a better word) sing, stab, dance mysteriously (with occasional percussion) and ask deep questions with high-register dissonances and busy, swarm-like textures – all with a Middle Eastern flavour enhanced by microtones made to sound like the most natural thing in the world.

With somewhat different powers of insinuation, Radio Afloat is composed for and performed by Chaker with her band Sarafand, which serves her in ways similar to Missy Mazzoli’s Victoire group, as a serious but more vernacular creative outlet. The nine pieces examine the implications of the album’s concept (literally a radio afloat on ocean waves) with individual subtitles such as ‘Southern Sky’. Instrumentation is more varied than in Vigil in what is a showcase of sorts for Chaker’s distinct way of melding Middle Eastern inflections in her singing and violin-playing but with jazz-infused momentum. Solos are longer (some bracingly adventurous, others inclined towards digression), have more give and take among the different instruments, and are all built on a bedrock of ostinatos and riffs. Most imaginative is the finale: a mood piece with a wide-ranging violin solo and watery microtone piano, suggesting that the radio of the title is no longer afloat.

No matter where she fits musically, Chaker has been welcomed into the classical world – her full-length chamber opera Ruinous Gods is being premiered at the 2024 Spoleto Festival USA – though she obviously doesn’t operate in any typical classical playing field. Though Vigil is predominantly composed by her, ETHEL string quartet members contribute movements – achieving cohesion because they all use similar compositional building blocks and are effectively sequenced within a strong dramatic arc.

Chaker has the sole composing credit for Radio Afloat, though there’s clearly much collaboration and improvisation at work. It’s hard to pinpoint her overall compositional personality at present, and Chaker’s own words in the booklet notes aren’t easily parsed: ‘I hope to illuminate the delicate balance in the interplay between human agency and environmental resilience.’ This is like modernist composers explaining their use of tone rows – interesting, though like viewing architecture through its scaffolding. Suggestion: just listen.