Ergodos has in recent years become an essential platform for new music. An independent label founded by the Irish composers Benedict Schlepper-Connolly and Garrett Sholdice, it specialises in tastefully packaged releases with an aesthetic at once classical and rootsy. Ergodos’s catalogue ranges from Kevin Volans to traditional Irish music via a recent Ficino Ensemble disc of Brahms, Ravel and Sholdice; blending genres is a speciality.

I was looking forward to this Andrew Hamilton disc and it doesn’t disappoint. Where Hamilton’s NMC portrait disc (for which – declaration – I wrote the booklet notes; 7/18) featured elaborate ensemble works, ‘Joy’ strips things back to just Hamilton himself singing and accompanying himself on violin. The virgin listener might have to adjust their ear for this relatively unconventional, at times slightly unvarnished prospect. But the rewards are quick to come. The opening song The Spirit of Art (2011) sets the tone: playful and puckish, it fuses childlike spontaneity with careful craft.

Following studies with Louis Andriessen and Gerald Barry, Hamilton established a distinctive style drawing on processual post-minimalist fragmentation and the rich traditional harmony and melody of composers such as Mozart and Handel. a (2014) presents shards of material ceaselessly repeated and shuffled. What at first appears garbled and incoherent gradually over the course of 15 minutes, almost in the manner of Griseyan spectralism, unfolds into an extended, slow, calm phrase. May’s pizzicato accompaniment and lyrics of reflection and longing (‘my heart burst forth, love, in beautiful May’) recalls the Elizabethan lute song of Dowland.

Hamilton has said that this disc showcases a moment when he withdrew from large-scale works into the straightforward joy music gave him as a child. This is clear from the hymn-like product #1 (2009), the disc’s standout. A tribute to an unnamed person (‘You gave me hope when all hope was gone’), it traces a continuous homophonic melody over subtle background organ and piano. With each iteration, the sung phrase changes ever so slightly: processes of addition and subtraction, of augmentation and diminution, gradually transform the simple tune into something near-cubist in character. As often with Hamilton, surface clarity belies the music’s compositional sophistication.