Returning on the subway from a 2015 concert in Brooklyn by Roomful of Teeth, Vivien Schweitzer of The New York Times overheard one of her fellow passengers describe the ensemble they’d both just heard as ‘like a glee club, but cool in a really nerdy way’. Regardless of how you choose to describe Roomful of Teeth, who have been making music together for the past 14 years, eventually the idea of virtuosity is bound to surface. It’s hard to imagine an ensemble, vocal or instrumental, whose performances exhibit greater cohesion, unity of intent and kaleidoscopic variety of expression. Even for an ensemble conceived in the spirit of the avant-garde, it’s surely astonishing that Roomful of Teeth remain so consistently yet freshly cutting-edge.

The centrepiece of their latest release, and the source of its title, is a five-movement response to Shakespeare’s The Tempest by the inimitable Caroline Shaw called The Isle. A longtime member of Roomful of Teeth, Shaw was 30 when she became the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. With movements named for Ariel, Caliban and Prospero, bracketed with a prologue and an epilogue, The Isle is less an evocation of the Shakespeare play than a distillation of its essence.

William Brittelle is a co-founder of New Amsterdam Records, the not-for-profit label with some 120 releases in its catalogue, and like Shaw he is a North Carolinian. His three-movement Psychedelics opens the programme, integrating synth with the ensemble and creating striking effects with vocal glissandos. At eight and a quarter minutes, Eve Beglarian’s None More Than You is the longest single movement. The composer is soloist, achieving remarkable rhetorical variety with a closely held mic. The six-movement Bits torn from words by Peter S Shin concludes the programme. Shin, a second-generation Korean American, is from Kansas City, Missouri, and at 31 the youngest of the four composers represented here.

Perhaps the most lasting impression, beyond the significant interest and intrinsic beauty of these works individually, is how their similarity of means produces such vividly contrasted expressive ends. If you’re interested in the expressive potential of the human voice or would simply like a glimpse into what’s happening musically in the United States, don’t miss this one.