In the normal run of things, music has a beginning and an end, with a middle that you find somewhere in between, a convention the Swiss composer Katharina Rosenberger tries to dismiss. TEXTUREN (the title is always written in capital letters) was created for the New York-based New Music ensemble Wet Ink and, on paper at least, looks like a cycle of nine self-contained chamber works – eloquently expressive (always lowercase) titles, too: miroir for flute and soprano saxophone, scatter 2.0 for six musicians, torsion for solo piano and so on, all composed between 2008 and 2011.

An early hint of Rosenberger’s structural mind-tease becomes apparent when you realise that her first piece, in cloud forests, is actually labelled Interlude I – not ‘prologue’, ‘introduction’ or ‘preface’ but ‘interlude’. Rosenberger wouldn’t, of course, be the first composer to wish that the temporal narrative of music didn’t always have to move forwards in time and instead aim at sound that steadfastly inhabits the continuous present. And Rosenberger’s harmony is fit for purpose: as a sine wave of pillowy electronic noise crescendos towards a shrill cut off – fuffffffffffffffffDING! – that interruption itself rings a new beginning. The opening gesture is then repeated and intensified, this time the intoning bell dramatically slamming a door on what one assumed was the underlying sound environment. Think again. TEXTUREN launches with a hallucination: no room for cosy, linear narratives here.

Although her base gestural language sails very close to a post-IRCAM/spectralist palette (Gérard Grisey is even referenced in the booklet-notes), that doesn’t somehow matter. Rosenberger’s nine, what to call them – parts? layers? strata? – are heard folding and melting through each other, Kate Soper’s dapper part-sung, part-spoken handling of the text lending a further coating of commentary. The jittery, open-ended solo piano piece torsion ends the cycle with a mid-point cadenza. Start with an interlude and it’s only proper you should end at the middle.