Looking for something to blow the musical cobwebs away? Try Henrik Hellstenius. For the past three decades, the Norwegian composer has developed a bold, dynamic musical language that delves deep into the dark underbelly of the human condition. As if the Law is Everything (on the 2021 LAWO album ‘Past & Presence’) explored the rules that regulate human behaviour, while the following year Places of Sounds and Words (also LAWO) reflected on domestic abuse and environments of fear.

Both are recommended, as are the two works included on this new release: Public Behaviour for percussion, six solo singers and orchestra, and Together for six singers, piano, sampler and percussion. The focus lies here on the often complex and fractious nature of human relationships. Both works are scored for vocal ensemble (excellently sung by Nordic Voices) rather than solo voice, enabling Hellstenius to treat the text and its sounds in more polyphonic, polymorphous and multilayered ways.

In the opening movement of Public Behaviour, Hellstenius fragments each phrase by splitting the words between each voice. These detached enunciations are heard against a shimmering harmonic gesture on clarinet, harp, piano and vibraphone, splashed on to the sonic canvas, suggesting the composer’s indebtedness to spectralism (Hellstenius studied composition with Gérard Grisey during the early 1990s). Such spectral qualities are nevertheless transformed into something more profoundly and disturbingly human in Hellstenius’s music. At times it exudes a raw, almost pungent quality despite its surface complexity. These emotions bubble under the surface in some of the movements in Public Behaviour, such as ‘Falling Apart’ and ‘Politeness and Anger’ – the latter combining extreme reactions and outbursts to darkly comical effect – before culminating in the unhinged cacophony of hysterical shrieks and cries in the final movement, ‘The Square’.

Together, which is scored for a smaller group, is a more intimate work, containing some meditative moments. Both demonstrate Hellstenius’s ability to articulate in musical terms what Nietzsche called the ‘Human, All Too Human’ condition. As Simon Cummings writes in an excellent set of booklet notes, Hellstenius’s music manages to express ‘the anxieties, desires and uncertainties that lurk within each of us and guide, shape, distort and determine our relationship with everyone else’. Potent, powerful stuff.