No one familiar with Gráinne Mulvey (b1966) would accuse her of taking the path of least resistance. Here, the legacy of John Tyndall (1820 93) – physicist, explorer and author – has inspired a series of works that variously investigate (occasionally interrogate) the instruments and their material to the hard-hitting if absorbing extent found in her output overall, not least the anthology ‘Akanos’ (Navona, 2014), which introduced her music to a wider listening public.

Nowhere more so than Diffractions (2014) with its orchestral evolution from pounding ‘white noise’, via antagonistic harmonic, rhythmic and timbral layers, to the heady agglomeration of diverse gestures in a systematic progress the more visceral for its brevity. Interference Patterns (also 2014) homes in on this traversal with its variations on a ground, these latter rising through the piano’s registers and referencing various harmonic spectra prior to an open-ended conclusion. Conversely, LUCA (2017) references the Last Universal Common Ancestor theory with which Tyndall sought to continue Darwinian thinking. The ensemble throws out ostensibly random motifs whose emergent pitches gradually spread across its entirety, while also taking on more tangible (hence intelligible) qualities, before it rapidly disperses toward the nirvana of silence.

Solo piano is heard to very different effect in the next two pieces. Calorescence (2013) draws on Tyndall’s obsolete theory of the reciprocation between infrared energy and light emission, with its transformation of amorphous gestures at the lower register into focused ideas across the keyboard. Sun of Orient Crimson with Excess of Light (2020) acknowledges Tyndall as a poet: lines from his evocation of Alp Lusgen underpin a combining of the acoustic instrument with sampled or treated sounds as a parallel between the permanence of the natural world and the spontaneity of human action. Finally, Excursions and Ascents (2019) responds to Tyndall’s drawings of glaciers in a cello concerto whose three movements portray the struggle of ascent, the other-worldly play of sunlight on ice, then the immutable terror of the surrounding formations.

Performances are as fearlessly committed as this music necessitates, with sound of unsparing definition and immediacy. Notes on works and musicians aside, the booklet includes Norman McMillan’s essay on Tyndall, whose ideas met with widespread outrage in his native Ireland and remain controversial. It duly adds up to a fascinating, disconcerting but engrossing listen.