This disc is named after the negative-sounding title of Marc André’s ni (an abbreviation of “nach innen” – “towards the inside”). This consists of seven chamber “miniatures”, in which for the most part pitched gestures gradually give way to noise-based, unstable sonorities. Admittedly that’s as one might expect from a student of Lachenmann, except that the humour that has increasingly leavened his mentor’s approach seems not to interest André, for the moment at least. Yet there’s something undeniably compelling in this scorched-earth approach, even as in movement after movement one is returned to silence.

The booklet-notes notwithstanding, I had real difficulty in relating the title to the other pieces on the disc. Kaija Sariaaho’s Graal theatre places the solo violin (and the rest of the ensemble) within a succession of rather static harmonic fields, with the result that even the soloist’s more frantic efforts are themselves oddly static, as though preserved in aspic. Can this be a misjudgement? Perhaps; but if so, whose? Might it be that this piece and André’s don’t really belong in each other’s company, let alone side by side? That, at any rate, is what repeated listening suggests to me. Nor is the sense of unresolved programming dispelled by the shortest work on the disc, Ian Willcock’s Grave, which is more dark than funereal, its opening gesture gradually extended and distended until a musical argument emerges – or rather erupts into being. Thereafter, the work’s progress is quite remorseless (or “single-minded”, depending on your point of view). Willcock’s emphasis on sonic “chaos”, which he carries off with commendable resourcefulness, certainly contrasts with the other two pieces here; but, for all musikFabrik’s unimpeachable efforts, the project’s overall effect is decidedly odd.