It’s not uncommon these days for new releases to be saddled with adjectives like groundbreaking or cutting-edge. But from time to time, as on this debut NMC solo disc by Australian pianist and composer Zubin Kanga, those adjectives are warranted. ‘Cyborg Pianist’ is a result of Kanga’s multi-year music research project Cyborg Soloists, hosted at Royal Holloway, exploring technological extensions of the piano. The double-disc release features associated music by a cohort of exciting British composers, and my overall impression is of a new wave of experimentalism, very much modern British in character, influenced by the likes of Jennifer Walshe and Matthew Shlomowitz and having little to do with traditional musical Britishness.

Take, for example, Oliver Leith’s outstanding Vicentino, love you – studies for keyboard. Here, Kanga plays a Prophet Rev II synthesiser, an instrument also used by the alternative electronica act Rival Consoles. Deploying a warm synth pad sound familiar from 1980s synth pop, Leith flips it on its head by tuning the synthesiser microtonally and channelling it into a bizarre, Renaissance music-influenced lyricism. It’s like Dowland mixed with Aphex Twin, with the wry humour of Satie, and, as with much else on the album, it’s refreshing and youthful. Slightly less immediate is Laurence Osborn’s Counterfeits (Siminica˘). Kanga plays a touch-sensitive TouchKeys keyboard whose keys, as well as sounding piano notes, trigger samples of Osborn singing in a warbling folk-musical style. Kanga’s darting runs up the keyboard are compelling, though the surreal folk song element is probably better appreciated live.

Tying in with the themes of augmented reality and cyborg instruments, Emily Howard’s DEVIANCE was composed using brain scans from listeners combined with AI-generated sounds and the live piano. The piano plays atonal contrary-motion lines while explosions of noise sporadically rush up. On the British-Iranian composer Shiva Feshareki’s Whirling Dervishes, Kanga is joined by the composer on turntable and electronics. The swirling, ecstatic Sufi dances of the title are conjured by synthesiser washes of noise and glissandos. If occasionally the instrumental balance feels off, with the piano relegated to a supporting role, at other times the electronics make the piano resplendent as Kanga moves up and down the keyboard in chromatic runs and shimmering harmonic series.

The album’s opening track is Laura Bowler’s experimental music-theatre piece SHOW(ti)ME, an internet-life satire full of speech and noise babble. Kanga uses MiMU sensor gloves to generate sounds through hand gestures. The gloves come on again for the closer, Kanga’s composition Hypnagogia (after Bach), inspired by listening to Bach in that delirious state between sleep and waking. A wonderfully psychedelic synthesiser workout, it gives us a sense of the potential the synthesiser, here a Korg Prologue, has for generating luscious, complex sounds in a concert-hall context.