This is the third album to profile Icelandic composer Hugi Gumundsson, with a fourth on the way in 2023 from Dacapo in Denmark, where he lives. His crystalline music absolutely deserves the exposure and will not waste a second of your time.

None of it tries to be clever, which only exposes the brains that underpin it. That much is apparent even from the movement titles of the headline work, Equilibrium IV: Windbells (now 18 years old). ‘Funeral in a Deserted Church’ pads along gently. ‘Foreign’ introduces new colours and textures that have a citric unfamiliarity. ‘Agitated’, the opener, frets to establish a delectable balance between the bass flute, bass clarinet, cello, guitar, piano and electronics of the ensemble that allows for a clarity of texture which itself amplifies Gumundsson’s discipline of utterance.

The two movements of Entropy for flute, clarinet and piano present the same material, first compact and pointillist (in which it brings to mind music by another North Atlantic composer, Sunleif Rasmussen), then atomised into a more laconic homage to Olivier Messiaen (perhaps it wears its influence a touch too heavily here). Listen past that and the structure of this second movement is tighter than the composer implies in the booklet – intriguingly so.

The following piece echoes that same process in a single movement. Lux extends Icelandic music’s obsession with the flute, enacting another steady process of disintegration from something taut into something free – at first apparently tempo-less (yes, very Icelandic) before settling into a sort of rotational meditation. The turning point is a series of beguiling organ-like chords – here, flutes manipulated by electronics (behind the ‘solo’ flute), but in the original version a live flute choir.

That moment is echoed in the last of the Songs from Hávamál II, ‘Lítilla sanda’, which resembles a stringent, looping Baltic hymn in its assertion that ‘little are the minds of men’. The texts are from a 13th-century Icelandic source and attributed to Odin, full of aphorisms that bring to mind Wotan’s valedictory advice to Siegfried. The second of them is charged by a lyricism that glances towards the Orient while the third lodges itself on ascending scales much like the final pages of Nixon in China.

As the album itself is echoing the structure of its opening works, these pithy songs seem refreshingly free after all the order that came before – including Brot, three contrasting fragments subjected to still more clean, unfussy exploration but separated by interludes that electronically replay them in reverse, toying with our sense of time. As in the last of them, a sort of wonky klezmer, never are you in doubt as to what you’re listening to. That goes for everything here. The performances – particularly from flautist Áshildur Haraldsdóttir and the velvety voice of Hildigunnur Einarsdóttir – are highly accomplished and put the music first.