Following recordings of his chamber music for the NEOS label by PHACE and ensemble recherche, and Ensemble Intégrales, this is the third portrait CD of the Mexican composer Arturo Fuentes. The four string quartets here were conceived as a cycle, composed between 2008 and 2015, and for those interested in Fuentes’ music the disc perhaps offers a more straightforward, less heterogeneous route in.

Certainly there is a stylistic and sonic coherence to these four pieces, reflected and suggested by their titles: the music inhabits a crystalline sound world, all harmonics and sul ponticello sibilance. In the fourth, those glassy harmonics are augmented with a glass harmonica, playing a 24-note microtonal bed, as well as electronics that resynthesise and multiply its sound.

Born in Mexico in 1975, Fuentes moved to Europe in 1997. He currently lives in Innsbruck, but along the way he has worked at many of the major centres for electronic music: IRCAM, the Freiburg Experimental Studio, the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology at the Zurich Hochschule der Künste. In a 2010 interview, he made explicit the link between such global mobility, digitalization and his own musical aesthetic: ‘Boundaries have been eliminated by information technology, not just the physical boundaries, but also those that are encountered during sound production. Today we can mix different layers of sound in the computer. With the microstructure as its foundation the overall sound contains a diverse unity’.Footnote ¹

All of which could be potentially fruitful musical ground, but unfortunately in this case I don't think it proves to be. Having listened to this disc several times over the course of a week or so I'm still struggling to find something of interest to say about much of it. It is certainly technically accomplished, and in its details – the tiny interactions between voices, the shaping of ensemble gestures – imaginatively conceived (the Diotima Quartet do excellent work in bringing all this out), but details alone are not enough.

I think I have identified two problems, or at least barriers to my getting more from this music. The first is that sound world. Ultimately, it makes for a fairly narrow expressive band, and until we get to the glass harmonica and electronics of Glass Distortion, Fuentes does little to throw it into relief. By the end of third piece, Ice Reflection, it has all started to sound very samey. Rather than a cycle of works – suggesting movement and change – this feels like several iterations of the same basic idea.

The second is to do with the work's unfolding structures, which seem all too straightforward. Again, almost nothing unexpected happens; the broad gestural language is familiar from other contemporary repertory, and (in spite of the talk of ‘sonic labyrinths’ and ‘musical kaleidoscopes’ that Fuentes uses to describe his own work) the music rarely steps outside the lines that it draws for itself at the start.

I say ‘almost’ and ‘rarely’ because there is one exception. It comes a few minutes into Glass Distortion – so about two-thirds of the way into the cycle in terms of timings – and continues for much of the rest of that piece. This is when the electronics begin to take over and the quartet falls almost silent. Suddenly the bass register is opened up, percussive attacks become a possibility (perhaps inevitably there are some tolling, bell-like sounds in here – but unusually they act as a pleasant contrast rather than spectralist cliché), the music acquires new dimensions. In the face of all this, the quartet takes on a different role too. The endless threads of harmonic filigree continue, yes, but there is a greater use of space now that the electronics are available to fill in the gaps. Dialogic possibilities are also introduced, and Fuentes does interesting and attractive things with these too. Frankly, at this point the CD takes off and becomes something considerably more compelling. Glass Distortion, then, makes for a fine view. But as part of this overall disc it comes at the end of a long walk.