Like many rock musicians who managed to piggyback their radical ideals off a 1970s music industry still prepared to sign the cheques on condition that the albums actually sold, Tim Hodgkinson has since reinvented himself as a composer. Hodgkinson played clarinet and saxophones with Henry Cow, the militant rock group whose Marxism with a backbeat was bankrolled (at first) by Richard Branson’s Virgin label. The history of 1970s prog rockers who have turned their hands to extended pieces for classical musicians is not a happy one; but whereas Mike Oldfield, Jon Lord and Karl Jenkins have normally defaulted towards stuffy conservatoire correctness, Hodgkinson has composed a world entirely of his own.

This release anthologises five works for ensemble and electronics, with Hodgkinson’s accompanying booklet-notes providing a dazzlingly perceptive personal manifesto. ‘Just being there in the environment,’ he insists, is no longer enough. The compositional forms of old, those ‘invisible processes’ which once guaranteed composers a degree of creative certainty, have lost their fizz and his art starts from that disconnect. His ideas about composition are so eloquent and persuasive that you fear the music itself can’t possibly live up to the billing but the first sound you hear – a sloping wall of brass that slams headfirst into a basso profundo piano cluster – resonates easily with statements such as ‘I want listeners’ assumptions to go wrong, because this is what awakens listening’.

And this music is all about awakening. When Hodgkinson writes about music’s ‘inner performance’ – we feel music performing us, ‘continuously forming a new subjectivity within us from the magma of sound’ – the pieces bear him out. Ulaaraar (2005) for bass clarinet and strings doesn’t so much start as ignite harmonic nail bombs, while Amhas/Nirriti (2001) begins with a slow-motion crescendo like nothing else I’ve ever heard. Approaching from a faraway horizon, seams of micro-intervals and ever-denser orchestration accrue force before burning out with the physical hit of icy water sloshing against a roasting-hot griddle pan – a sonic emergency.

But another type of physicality draws the disc to its conclusion. Attaot (2009) ends with ricocheting string figurations overlaid with what sound like electronic tongue-clicks. The surrounding silence dances in sympathy; the final click gets scooped up by the recording and is held in the air before being diced into a long oblivion.