For Line Tjørnhøj, the human voice is a rare expression of truth in our bewildering deepfake world. Tjørnhøj’s multimedia vocal work enTmenschT (which in live performance additionally features sculptures created on stage) explores two disturbing early 20th-century stories for what they say about our current divisions between public and private, artificial and authentic.

The first tale is that of the German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, murdered at Auschwitz. Salomon had an affair with the singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn and probably murdered her sexually abusive grandfather by poisoning. The second tale is the sordid saga of Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, which culminated in Kokoschka, once Mahler had left him, having a doll made of her likeness, which grotesque simulacrum he paraded around Vienna. enTmenschT sets text from letters between these two couples. If all that sounds like a lot to take in, it is.

enTmenschT’s subtitle is ‘an artwork of our time’. The individual sections have hashtag titles, and the opening comprises text-to-speech software narrating Tjørnhøj’s thoughts – slightly off-putting, since the text is jargony academese. Thereafter, the ever-wonderful Theatre of Voices sing and whisper and cry fragments from the epistolary texts. ‘#innocuoussouls #demagification’ opens with a nocturnal modal polyphony, splintered words from Alma and Oskar floating in vocal space, occasionally cohering in homophony before ending on a major triad (with evocative light reverb). Another beautiful movement, ‘#puppetry’, is all emotional yearning, with high soprano and high tenor pulling tensely like two ends of a cord.

In general, though, it’s heavy stuff, conceptually dense music evoking trauma, as per one of the section titles, ‘#suicidal’. ‘#throwbacks’ features the unpleasant sound of spitting, while ‘#lament’ ends in a polyphony of downwards-tending glissandos. ‘#suicidal’ recalls early modernism in its use of female Sprechgesang, and there are echoes throughout of the Second Viennese School. Theatre of Voices sing with pathos and precision, but the disc’s appeal will depend on how good your German is and where you stand with hardcore modernism.