That supremely dystopian Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard once described Christine Lavant’s writing as “testimony to a destroyed world”. In building Die Sterne des Hungers (“The Stars of Hunger”) around poems by Lavant, the Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b1957) offers his own testimony but in the form of a resistance to destructiveness in which mechanical strategies (the very acme of the modern) confront the inescapable force of memory, that most personal, psychological index of human identity.

Die Sterne des Hungers (2007) might begin with starved, chilled sounds and with memories of another text, Machaut’s Ma fin est mon commencement. But even before the commencement of its dramatically sustained vocal line it turns wild and loud, perhaps in homage to Lang’s jazz-playing past, and as if attempting to shake off the suggestion of memory as reverence. Sabine Lutzenberger has the ideal mixture of roughness and smoothness to convey Lang’s dislocated treatment of Lavant’s words, and this, together with instrumental textures that move between starkness and delicacy with a very un‑random sense of control, makes Die Sterne des Hungers a mightily potent example of late modernism, 21st-century style.

Monadologie VII…for Arnold (2009) is no less troubled by memory – specifically, by Arnold Schoenberg’s long-unfinished Chamber Symphony No 2. The oppressive atmosphere here is so powerful that even if you don’t recognise the specific allusions to Schoenberg’s music, a sense of the late-Romantic style as a burden that can never be completely got rid of should be unmistakable. Lang’s mechanistic rejection of refinement battles with the suffused distillations projected from his hyperactive relation to the potent musical past. Vividly recorded in performances of the greatest concentration and technical skill, this disc is a fine vindication of Kairos’s enlightened attitude to A&R.