Everyone likes a composer with an unusual back story, and Philip Blackburn’s is more unusual than most. Born in Cambridge in 1962, Blackburn studied as a choral scholar at Clare College before relocating to the US, where encounters with experimentalists such as Pauline Oliveros and Harry Partch turned his assumptions about music upside down. Blackburn now oversees the Partch archive and runs the Innova label, which releases this latest disc dedicated to his work.

But Blackburn hasn’t rejected his English choral past – instead, he’s devised composition strategies to make all the associations that come with English choral music co-exist with his ‘American’ side. As he persuasively puts it, ‘We spend more time filtering out sounds than we do being aware of them. Result: more aural clutter, more environmental pollution, more insensitivity to others and ourselves. How can I help myself and others practise listening and reclaim our soundscape? I compose to make us aware of our own composing.’

And so the disc opens with Duluth Harbour Serenade (2011), an eight-minute snatch of sound art that uses microphones like a movie camera to slowly zoom in, and around, Duluth Harbour during Labor Day celebrations. Celebratory music bounces against the harbour’s infrastructure: ship horns, steam trains and the groaning of the bridge rising; bounces into babbling conversation and song. By filtering everyday sounds, we engage in the practice of listening.

At the other end of the scale is Gospel Jihad (2010), performed with luminous precision by the choir of Blackburn’s alma mater; and in between sits Ghostly Psalms, a 50-minute multimedia work some 20 years in the planning. Dreamt into being via a classic anxiety dream in which he followed a clear trickle of water through a desert to find an abbey in a medieval village where a choir sang, this trippy, occasionally apocalyptic work knocks reality sideways. Intimate vocal soliloquies wrestle free from walls of sustained choral and string drones that morph and change with the (anti)logic of a dream’s unruly narrative.