An enigmatic soundscape shivers into being in Gemma Peacocke’s Amygdala for solo cello and fixed electronics. The cellist wends her way, tentatively, towards acoustic clarity, playing richly expressive double-stops as if coming up for air. Vaguely rising currents suggest an attempted ascent towards liberation from a persistently unsettling memory; the enveloping fog keeps pulling her back. From the start, Lavena’s debut album casts the young cellist not just as an intrepidly curious adventurer but as a deeply mindful musician.

Born Lavena Johanson, she is a founding member of the Atlas String Quartet and a dedicated member of the new music scene in Baltimore. Lavena’s programme consists entirely of compositions created over the past dozen years – three of them are premiere recordings (Peacocke, Montgomery and Dessner) – but to each she brings the conviction worthy of a longstanding piece of repertoire. Styles shift dramatically from one selection to the next. From Amygdala she pivots persuasively to the quasi-improvisatory camaraderie of Jessie Montgomery’s Duo (with violinist William Herzog), described by the composer as tracing the heartfelt as well as antic exchanges of a friendship.

But it is especially with the meditative concentration called for by Caroline Shaw’s in manus tuas that Lavena seems most at home. Thomas Tallis’s motet of the same name is not so much the source as the spectral, fragmented memory that fitfully haunts the piece. Shaw originally wrote it for a secular Compline service in a candlelit church. Required to sing wordlessly as well, Lavena gracefully navigates the time-tunnel effect of Shaw’s piece, tantalisingly poised between plaintive echoes of tradition and the present moment. Bryce Dessner’s Tuusula, named for the Finnish lake setting where a chamber music festival is held, is also for solo cello and similarly juxtaposes reminiscences of tradition. Amid the Bachian arpeggios that weave into the foreground, Lavena carves out vast, solitary, contemplative spaces.

The premise of Ted Hearne’s duo Furtive Movements is both political and musical: the title comes from the New York City Police Departments’s ‘stop and frisk’ policy. Hearne interrogates the practice of profiling by subtly shifting the ‘assumed identities’ of cellist and percussionist (Jeff Stern). Lavena and her partner turn what might otherwise be a barrage of sound effects into a compelling narrative. The final meditation of her extraordinary debut is my heart comes undone, a valentine from husband and composer Judah Adashi (inspired by Björk’s song ‘Unravel’) that combines intimacy with its intensity.