If I could take only a few forms of music to a desert island, the psalms sung to Anglican Chant would be among them. I listen to chanted psalms every day and have spent many an hour wondering why this curious, idiosyncratic, geographically specific and highly limited tradition exercises such a stranglehold on my musical imagination.

Step forwards Andrew Nethsingha, who comes close to providing answers in a booklet essay for this release that is as nourishing as the recordings themselves. In disembowelling the wonders of Anglican psalm-singing Nethginsha explores reference points as broad as Beethoven, Feldman, Sibelius, Paavo Berglund, the Takács Quartet, Frank Gehry and our very own Martin Cullingford. Nethsingha wants psalms at St John’s to sound man-made but to float in the air – to be full of the rapt concentration of poetry and the collective emotional experience of life.

And yes, the psalms at St John’s have always sounded different – with that distinctive glow, rooted in text, somehow more like the human voice with which the psalmist speaks in anger, pain, love and joy. Here is the latest incarnation of a tradition that matured under George Guest (when Nethsingha was organ scholar) and Christopher Robinson, plotted on regular webcasts and broadcasts as well as on the choir’s recent ‘Eastertide Evensong’ recording (6/22).

What is there left to say about the ‘performances’ (almost certainly not the right word)? This snapshot of 13 psalms (or portions thereof) sits at the opposite end of the spectrum to the sometimes breathless and lacklustre psalms series on Priory – albeit with the danger that their polish and lack of context makes the experience feel phoney (a concern also addressed in the booklet). Nethsingha knows what he wants from choir, microphones – and organist: there are no dramatic contrasts or solo-stop gimmicks here, just that air-cushion of sound and the St John’s speciality of coupling changes in chant together via the celestial thread of a single organ note.

From the singing you have the sense of a choir whose two halves are locked in eye contact across the nave of a narrow, tall chapel where ritual has its own sense of intimacy and contemporaneity. I’m with Nethsingha on the St John’s way of presenting psalms as single entities without recourse to unisons or antiphonal exchange (though that does work well elsewhere), allowing the repetition referred to by Nethsingha as ‘waves lapping on a shoreline’ to take on its own sense of reflection and reassurance. The choir never over-sings but its timbre can tense up and slacken like a quartet’s. Musically, this is the best of them: the reason Nethsingha can write in the booklet that psalm-singing ‘informs everything else we do – technically, musically and emotionally’.

To be picky, perhaps this is not truly the best of them. It’s good to hear the highly individual combination of music, text and delivery that comes with St John’s singing Psalm 139 to the chant by Skeats, Psalms 2 and 148 to chants by Robinson, Psalm 85 to the chant by Hemmings and – the highlight here, with the Skeats – Psalm 188 to the chant by Prendergast. But do head online to hear the choir’s rendition of Psalms 56 and 89 to chants by Alcock, its Psalm 144 to a chant by Higgins, its Psalm 30 to a chant by Turle and its first portion of Psalm 119 to a chant by Elvey – all of which are highly distinctive to this place and whose stillness resounds even more when surrounded by the relative activity of a full evensong.