Although his House of Bedlam collective was behind the notable album Talking Microtonal Blues (1/14), this is the first disc to be devoted to Larry Goves. Cardiff-born (in 1980) and resident in London, Goves brings a singular perspective to orthodox formal conceptions and nominally everyday occurrences. Not least Trends in personal relationships (2012), a suite whose movement titles conceal a wealth of unlikely events, such as the fractious collisions of ‘Benign violations’ and the ultimately enervated rounds of ‘Exhausted English landscapes’. More focused in its outward trajectory, the terminus wreck (2008) features unaccompanied cello in music that ranges from the plaintively lyrical, via the cumulatively aggressive, to the inwardly communing final movement – its inspiration in Paul Celan yielding an expression the more disturbing for its understatement, at least as eloquently rendered here by Oliver Coates.

Much the longest piece is Things that are… (2010), which is a piano concerto not merely in name but also in those contrasts that serve to instil an audible continuity between and across its movements as a whole. Despite (or because of?) the timbral disparities between the piano, with sampled and prepared enhancements, and an ensemble whose strings comprise at least 16 violins but one each of viola and double bass, the interplay is by no means removed from conventional practice – whether in the powerful underlying momentum of ‘blue’, alternation of soulfulness and skittishness in ‘white’ or skewed rhetoric of ‘black’, with its deftest of non-resolutions. An eventful and gripping work, consummately well realised by Sarah Nicolls.

Hopefully the other two pieces of this sequence inspired by Paul Auster’s novel The New York Trilogy will find their way on to disc in due course. For now, the present release bolsters Goves’s standing on the new music scene – and in no small measure.