George E Lewis (b1952) is nothing if not a musical polymath: composer, improviser, installation artist, activist, trombonist, teacher (from San Diego to New York; he was born in Chicago), award-winning author. His provocative first opera, Afterword (2015), has been performed in the USA – most recently at this year’s Ojai Music Festival – and in Europe, but his compositional hinterland stretches back to the 1970s.

The four works on New World’s release – the second the label has devoted to his music – are all recent, composed between 2012 and 2014, all are a little under a quarter-of-an-hour in length (there is less than two minutes’ difference in duration between the longest and shortest), and three are scored for a core ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion. Mnemosis (2012) adds a viola and Assemblage (2013) a viola and saxophone; The Mangle of Practice (2014) is a violin-and-piano duo, though unlike any other in the standard repertoire. Inspired by a 1984 article concerning actor network theory by Andrew Pickering, the duo is an exploration of how human interactions transform, even mutilate, situations and – as here – musical material.

Transformations and deformations are recurrent elements in Lewis’s music, development in the traditional sense often replaced by a process he describes as ‘self-scavenging’. The titles alone of Assemblage and Mnemosis (the act of remembering) shed a light on the compositional processes at work (often seeming chaotic) but do not hint at the sonic richness of the scores themselves, as in the gripping coda of Mnemosis or the concentrated, fractured textures of Hexis (2013). To say Ensemble Dal Niente’s performances are virtuoso conveys nothing of their intensity, ably captured in New World’s vivid, slightly fierce sound. One for contemporary specialists for sure, but fascinating nonetheless.