Since Jóhann Jóhannsson’s death in 2018 at the age of only 48, his label DG has done much to promote the Icelandic composer’s posthumous reputation by releasing several soundtrack albums and retrospective collections. One nevertheless senses there exists among the many musical cues and film themes a work of real vitality, power and significance – a jewel in the crown of Jóhannsson’s creative achievements.

Drone Mass may well be that work. On one level, this contemporary oratorio for voices, string quartet and electronics – commissioned by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) led by cellist Clarice Jensen, who are superb on this recording – is typically Jóhannssonian in its uncanny juxtaposition of the strange with the familiar and its rich interplay of multiple meanings. Even the work’s title plays on the dual notions of a ‘drone’ as something both musical and (often these days) more readily associated with unmanned aerial vehicles – which generate their own buzzing quality. Furthermore, ‘mass’ is treated by the composer as much as a kind of quantity of sound and texture as in its liturgical sense.

Nevertheless, it’s the addition of voices – that most human of elements, who sing ‘wordless’ texts based on the Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians – that enables the music to somehow take flight into galaxies far beyond our own here and now, imparting a timeless quality. Brilliantly sung by the Theatre of Voices directed by Paul Hillier, their presence is heard throughout this stirring work.

One can almost smell the incense in the serpentine Byzantine melody heard at the beginning, its austere ceremonial qualities especially appropriate given that the work was first performed at the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2015. This edgy opening gives way to ‘Two is Apocryphal’, a glowing halo of open vowel sounds and falling lines gently underpinned by a softly swaying repeating five-note figure, one of several tender moments in the mass, such as ‘Divine objects, part 2’ and ‘Moral vacuums’.

The work also contains much bleaker, unsettling moments, such as the aptly titled ‘The last foul wind I ever knew’ and the Cage-inspired ‘The low drone of circulating blood, diminishes with time’. Other movements foreground the crackle, pop and static of Jóhannsson’s accompanying electronic soundtrack, manipulated in real time and carefully restored from files located on the composer’s hard drive to give an uncannily accurate representation of what he would have done had he been there.

Perhaps it’s the way Drone Mass confounds expectations in unpredictable ways that will remain its most important legacy. Jóhannsson’s music gives the impression of having arrived in a time capsule from a distant planet that is a mirror image of our own. His own absence now adds further mystery and magic to his music’s unique sound world.