Listening to percussionist Joby Burgess is like a musical shot in the arm. His recordings are so full of vibrant energy, vitality and freshness.

So what’s the secret? The answer may lie partly in the eclectic repertoire alongside the colourful array of sounds generated by Burgess’s one-man percussion-plus-electronics ensemble. But most of it boils down to the virtuoso percussionist’s technical brilliance, fantastic agility and coordination, and innate musicality.

‘A Percussionist’s Songbook’ may well be Burgess’s best album yet. Conceived as a collection of songs without words, the album’s hidden narrative threads are woven around poems, song lyrics, stories, tales and fables ranging from Robert Graves to Arabian folk tales, from sci-fi novels to population growth statistics.

The varied nature of these textual sources is also reflected in the varied range of musical approaches. Some pieces focus on the sound of a single instrument, such as Burgess’s plangent Come Sweet Death for solo marimba or John Metcalfe’s beautifully crafted chorale-theme-plus-variations for xylosynth, Love without Hope. Other compositions throw the timbral net much wider. Tunde Jegede’s The Ancestors are Within opens with bowed vibraphones and Glass-like drones before launching into an extended section inspired by West African polyrhythms. By contrast, melodic patterns on marimba, kalimba and vibraphone are gently layered in Dobrinka Tabakova’s dreamlike Desert Swimmers. Yazz Ahmed’s funky Throw Your Pumpkin (& Pick Me Up) alternates marimba and more extended improvisational flourishes on vibraphone over a pulsing rhythmic ostinato that calls to mind jazz-fusion legend Mike Mainieri.

Gabriel Prokofiev, Dario Marianelli and Graham Fitkin’s compositions layer percussive sounds with electronics, voice recordings and speech samples to create more unsettling atmospheres. Contrapuntal exchanges between the speech recordings of American philosopher Michael Sandel and Burgess’s marimba underpin Marianelli’s Unequal, while the vocoder-enhanced voice in Fitkin’s Species conjures up a dystopian futuristic sound world. Burgess has said that every new project involves learning new methods and techniques. This means that he must approach each one with fresh ears. Maybe therein lies the secret to his success.