David Fennessy, now in his 40s, has come a long way since playing guitar in rock bands. Born in Ireland, now teaching in Scotland, his music is quite different from that of his own teacher, James MacMillan, or of the leading Irish maverick Gerald Barry. Yet it is no less insistent than Barry’s on keeping mainstream traditions at a distance, no less resourceful than MacMillan’s in seeking to depict places and spaces evocatively and, at times, confrontationally.

A fascination with instrumental sonority and the positive value of inflecting conventional tunings and notations, sometimes electronically, is clear in all four works included on this NMC Debut disc. What could presage an exercise in back-to-basics minimalism at the start of Panopticon soon proves deceptive as subtle harmonic nuances in the string sextet colour and counter the confident reiterations of the cimbalom. The title’s reference to a symmetrical structure, radiating out from an all-controlling centre, does not generate an entirely mechanical musical experience: on the contrary, the work progresses absorbingly over almost 20 minutes from a rooted, resonating core to something much more mysterious and allusive. This capacity to bring a quality of understatement gradually into focus also works well in 13 Factories, a concentrated and diverse meditation built around the recorded sounds of ‘old looms traditionally used in the Outer Hebrides to produce Harris Tweed’, as Kate Molleson’s helpful notes explain.

What might represent Fennessy’s more experimental side can be heard in the Piano Trio, subtitled ‘music for the pauses in a conversation between John Cage and Morton Feldman’. A radio discussion between the two celebrated composers, complete with pauses and laughter, coexists with Fennessy’s mordant musical response to ideas about oppositions and interactions between ‘pure art’ and ‘intrusion’, as overheard on the tape. If this is composition as special case – a one-off rather than a contribution to a genre – Fennessy provides a successful counterbalance in Hirta Rounds, a magical portrait in string-orchestral sound of a distant, deserted island in the Outer Hebrides. The steadily circulating harmonies, looping and wheeling like birds in flight, have a distinctly spectral quality, suggesting something frozen in time yet nevertheless slowly, imperceptibly transforming itself in ways which can only be guessed at. Here, as throughout these recordings from various expert ensembles, the sound balances are suitably alert to the intricate shifts of perspective that Fennessy builds into his refreshingly unpretentious scores.