Arturo Fuentes is a Mexican composer born in 1975 currently living in Austria, whose music has attracted sufficient attention to warrant performances from ensembles such as Recherche in Germany and PHACE in Austria (the latter, like the composer, being new to me). The six pieces offered here were all composed over the past four years (most are from 2012 13), they are for small chamber ensembles (two with added electroacoustics), and all last around 12 minutes. The similar time frame and forces may account for the fact that they sound remarkably similar: for the most part the sound world is a lively, effervescent perpetuum mobile in which the acoustic instruments obsessively repeat short snatches of phrasing, sometimes punctuated by silence. They hover between pitch and noise most of the time and are given plenty to do, so as a musical surface it is rather enticing and unpredictable.

But over time predictability sets in after all, either because the repeated materials congeal into harmonic stasis or because their relation to each other yields no discernible tension over the mid-term or direction over the longer term. In Space Factory III a slow, wailing oboe line initially proposes something different – as does a kalimba in Space Factory IV – but the temptation of pedals soon wins out (there’s an especially long one on G from the fifth minute onwards), as does the perpetuum mobile just before the conclusion. In Space Factory V and VI the electroacoustics function as a curtain through which the instruments emerge, but otherwise the gestural vocabulary changes little from work to work. The performances are as committed as one has come to expect from such musicians but the grit at the centre of this particular oyster eludes me.