If ‘Soosan Lolavar x Ruthless Jabiru’ initially sounds like the title of a gangsta rap album, nothing could be further from the truth. Ruthless Jabiru is in fact the name of an ensemble comprising Australasian musicians based in the UK – the brainchild of its founding artistic director and conductor, Kelly Lovelady – while Lolavar is a British-Iranian composer whose music sounds like nothing else on earth.

These unique qualities partly stem from Lolavar’s ability to suffuse modernist elements with Iranian classical music. The first track on the composer’s debut album, I Am the Spring, You Are the Earth, illustrates these East-West suffusions in quite startling ways. It takes its title from a poem by Ahmad Shamlou. Eerie wailing sounds generated during the work’s opening sections using slow-motion glissandos on strings provide a reassuringly avant-garde backdrop. That is, until the sudden appearance of the santoor – an Iranian hammered dulcimer – at around the two-and-a-half-minute mark. The santoor’s metallic timbre and shimmering presence jolt the music out of its modernist sensibilities, catapulting it into a very different sonic space.

Lolavar’s music never sits cosily into any style or genre, never quite ‘belongs’, and this ties in with the composer’s dual Iranian and British heritage, spending many years grappling with questions revolving around identity and self-discovery. While the sound of the santoor forms part of this ongoing quest in I Am the Spring, a lyrical Iranian folk song functions in a similar way in the title track, Girl. The folk song remains hidden under the music’s busy surface in the opening section until it’s quoted on solo cello during the slow middle section.

The santoor does not feature in Undone, for string ensemble, but its ghostly presence can nevertheless be heard in Lolavar’s use of alternative tunings and microtonally generated melodies. Composed in 2020 in response to the covid pandemic, the work is more haunting and fragile than I Am the Spring, with exposed lines on solo violin leading to violent, uncontrollable outbursts from the ensemble during the more animated middle section.

Duality, hybridity and double consciousness also form important elements in the final work, the 25-minute concerto for cello and string ensemble Tradition-Hybrid-Survival. Here the ensemble is split into three identity groups, called ‘local’, ‘diaspora’ and ‘outsider’, reflecting the shifting modalities of identity and existence that lie at the centre of Lolavar’s unique musical style and approach.