Brian Eno once argued that experimental composers are by instinct gardeners, who plant musical seeds that evolve into complex systems minded to grow beyond their control, as opposed to modern composition ‘architects’ who, like a Boulez or a Babbitt, draw up definitive designs which performers must follow to the letter.

The British composer James Weeks, 40 next year, falls equidistant between these two polarities. His Mala punica (2008 09) is intricately organised note-on-note. Eight solo voices sing a set of eight compositions that, as he explains, ‘channel the canon’s intrinsic momentum in different ways’. But encasing this vocal music, and interweaving through its veins, is another composition, written six years later. Walled Garden, for two alto flutes, bass flute and string trio, becomes like fertile soil or clay in which we hear Mala punica grow – and the concern is not just the counterpoint of note against note or of phrases shadowed, it’s the counterpoint of one composition set in motion against another.

Weeks has organised music like this before. His 2013 Métier release ‘Tide’ combined three stand-alone instrumental works entitled Burnham Air, Tide and Sky so that their ‘components [were] not so much simultaneous but coexistent’, as he noted. And in this latest work a similarly pleasing symmetry between form and content stitches intentions to sound. Weeks sets texts from the Song of Songs, his canonic structures symbolising the imagery of flowers blooming, gardens of lilies and a vine mutating into dense foliage, and his exquisite ear for luminous, ecstatic harmony expresses itself without needing to rely on hardy perennial stock sequences.

Weeks’s own Exaudi vocal ensemble is joined by the Hortus Ensemble in an immaculately detailed performance where each line carries weight and audibly contributes to the whole. The danger might arise, I suppose, that the evolving overlap between the two compositions begins to override our intrinsic interest in the pieces themselves. But through careful cultivating, mixed with an openness to letting his material run wild, Weeks proves himself both expert architect and gardener.