Until reaching the climactic summit of Riverine Delusions – where bass drum thwacks overpower the remainder of the ensemble – this album featuring recent work by the British composer Frank Denyer barely registers a mezzo-piano. The opening two pieces, Whispersand Woman with Jinashi Shakuhachi, both creep around a vocal twilight zone: music vanishing inside the shadows. Denyer’s own voice carries Whispers (2010) as Elisabeth Smalt plays offstage muted violin – a conventional violin approach twice removed. What this music might be ‘about’, what it could symbolise or depict, remains largely a mystery. Denyer whimpers, splutters, semi-whistles. The attitude is anti-bel canto, his utterances encased by silence and by obsessive minuscule scrapings on ancillary percussion instruments. Occasional ripenings of melody can never quite bring the music in from the shadowy cold.

Woman with Jinashi Shakuhachi (2008) and A Woman Singing (2009) – two pieces from an ongoing series for solo female performer – push similar existentialist buttons. Juliet Fraser’s performance of A Woman Singing circles around a base-palette of broken-up syllables, pinched portamentos and disembodied cries. In Whispers, Smalt’s supple, lithe violin lines pleach against Denyer’s voice and there’s a sense, if not of company exactly, then of two independent beings grappling to making sense of occupying the same space. But I felt as if I was eavesdropping on Fraser – bearing witness to an internal music escaping, like she can’t help it. Riverine Delusions (2007) and Two Voices with Axe (2010) return to terrain broadly familiar from earlier Denyer releases. The violent upshot of Riverine Delusions has already been alluded to but Two Voices with Axe, which features Bob Gilmore chopping wood with an axe, a strikingly brutal and disruptive sound, takes matters further: a primeval sound slicing through the subtone, muffled colours produced by voices and ensemble.