Howard Skempton’s solo clarinet Call (1983), heard on “Surface Tension” in a sensitive reading by John Corbett, tells me that I enjoy thinking about Skempton’s music as much as I enjoy hearing it. Carefully placed around Call’s largely open-ended, downriver rhythmic currents is a motif knitted together from “swung” quavers, which right away evokes Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, and reminds you how often English composers of a certain generation and aesthetic persuasion, writing their generic fast-slow-fast wind concertos and sonatas, try to sex up their pallid rhythmic oom-pahs with a jazzy shot in the arm.

Skempton – clever him – manages to have it both ways, though. That momentary sense of swing is like a wry slap on the wrist, delivered entirely without rancour or hectoring, towards such transatlantic tendencies. But he also wants listeners to derive pleasure from those peaks of rhythmic exhilaration, and so gives them prominence in the structure like a punctuating semi-quote, a knowing reference to material from outside his orbit. You hear, you enjoy, and then think about how more cavalier composers freeload off the gestural surface of jazz.

“Surface Tension” is terrific, and each of its 28 miniatures finds Skempton similarly probing the substructures of musical language: the 44‑second left-hand piano piece Passing Fancy (written for Benjamin Britten!) turns into a primer about the British lyrical impulse; Surface Tension itself sounds like Frank Bridge refracted through John Cage’s love of Satie. Mode’s other Skempton release, “Bolt from the Blue”, pairs Daniel Becker’s serene accounts of solo piano music with choral settings performed by Exaudi. Five Poems of Mary Webb and Two Poems of Edward Thomas might have appeared at any point during the last four centuries – and Skempton’s reimagining of basic harmonic principles (false relations allowed to sound gorgeously false again) could still be a going concern during the next 400 years, too.

Becker is more matter-of-fact than John Tilbury’s model 2001 Sony accounts, although even he can’t avoid The Durham Strike tipping into sentimentality. But too much mainstream contemporary music dazzles with the science of complex surfaces, or at worst nondescript clutter. Nothing to hear or think about there, but Skempton sounds like a future to me.