When I first heard Ed Bennett’s music several years ago, I was intrigued to hear a composer so adept at harnessing sound’s innate energy. It’s not rare these days for composers to engage with pop and rock (cf Turnage’s Beyoncé quotes), but it is rare to hear that influence used with such sensitivity and intelligence.

Freefalling for orchestra opens with hurtling momentum Bennett’s second NMC album. As Stephen Graham’s booklet note says, there is judiciousness and care in the orchestration. Abrupt Messiaen-esque textural contrasts occur between clusters of low rasping brass and pulsating percussion-driven heterophony. Instrumentation-wise, whatever’s there is serving a purpose, and once that purpose has been exhausted the piece ends at just the right point.

Song of the Books for solo cello, ensemble and electronics draws on the titular Irish traditional air (‘Amhrán na Leabhar’). Soloist Kate Ellis plays the first movement with soulfulness and close control over a sonic tapestry of crashing cymbals, tremolo strings and rhythmic piano. Bennett nails the task of mixing the folk material’s lamenting introversion with the ensemble’s high-definition fireworks. Particularly notable is the second movement, based on swelling spectralist chords that meld timbre and harmony, initially struck by the cello before rippling lysergically around the ensemble and dissipating in rumbling percussion.

Of the other works here, the titular Psychedelia is the standout. Psychedelia is more than tie-dyed T-shirts, LSD and beads: with its themes of synaesthesia, freedom and the wonder of nature, psychedelia returns us at a deeper level to the aims of Romanticism. A 20-minute orchestral slow build, Psychedelia at times has shades of Feldman in its textural weave of high strings, anchoring brass and gentle piano. But as the ensemble sound morphs from a swirling cauldron to a quiet plangent comedown, Bennett’s voice is unmistakably distinctive, one of the most interesting in the current UK scene.