Both, perhaps. Regardless, their coming together is seamlessly co-ordinated. Claus’ cello is often a central element, drifting in and out in haunted, minor-key arpeggiation and gritting into a friction that sounds like the amplified tearing of fabric. Something about his playing style – perhaps its penetrative, undiluted emotional evocation, or a culture shock that sends tremors of Claus’ Parisian heritage tremoring through Japanese tradition – coaxes a real performative fire out of his peers: choked and frenzied vocalisations in strange (perhaps imaginary) languages, dripping sine wave, tribal hand-slapped drums (rendered reverberant and aggressive by a slack skin), and orchestral extracts that fidget and convulse from skittish turntable manipulation.

The way the elements come together isn’t entirely seamless, and this is only to the release’s benefit. Brash entrances and strange juxtapositions bring a sort loose, epiphanic air to Jo Ha Kyu, as if the players were unexplainably compelled to make their sound on the basis of single – and crucial – synapse jumps. Stifled yelps explode in the quiet gaps between percussion hits, while beeping electronics hangs like a thin, vertical chandelier over tuneless, anti-gravity piano; the instrumental collisions are ungainly but always beautiful, making it difficult to tell whether Jo Ha Kyu is the result of painstaking architecture or one manic night of impulsive assembly.

The results are beautiful and often bizarre. Thrum collects works by four composers, all written for and performed by the quartet – personal experiences of an individual splayed across strings and thumbs and plectrums, audio theatrics that recast the quartet as actors and then fictional characters, ancient tradition unearthed in a warm and immersive twang of present tense. The quartet aren’t lifelessly compliant with the composer’s directions; they charge these pieces with their own thoughts and stories, unashamedly flecking the compositions with personality and subjection. One can even hear the players breathe and shuffle around in between the notes: little reminders that the quartet exists as more than four limp marionettes waiting to be musically animated.

Daniel Bernard Roumain’s works comprise an audio photo album of sorts: four pieces inspired by his previous home spots of Detroit, New York and Haiti. They are vibrant and go-getting, rendered energetic by rowdy, rattling downstrokes and dollops of sunbaked pop – virtuosic and yet care-free, soaking up the surrounding landscapes and dreaming blissfully into them.

David Evan Thomas tightens the reins to grant more focus on intricacy and ornamental detail. The cohesion between the four players is astonishing – the quartet scatter quickly into harmonic duets before swooping together again to create what sounds like one gigantic harp, dipping and rising in tempo and dynamic with the expressive fluidity of a theatrical monologue.

Van Stiefel re-introduces Roumain’s fusion of music and location, reimagining the quartet as travelling cowboys swapping tales around a campfire. No longer is the guitar a means of re-conjuring home – it is home, acting as a constant in a landscape of transitory blur. Unsurprisingly his work is the most conversational of the four composers, with luscious lines of melody complementing and re-enforcing the strums of the player before, and dissonant slanging matches erupting through stabs of buzzing nylon. The players’ voices even enter at one point – with choral “aah”s and “ooh”s arcing over the top of the guitars in surreal, off-axis harmonic combinations.

Finally, the introduction of Gao Hong’s Chinese pipa (a pear-shaped lute) demonstrates how the quartet’s collaborative capabilities extend beyond merely co-ordinating with eachother. The pipa’s bright, gracious tones take centre stage as the collective congregate around the edges, receding into gently stifled harmonies and lunging forward in oaky body thumps and percussive knocks – manifesting as an Eastern-tinged dance at one moment and a meditative garden the next – and even though these pieces are clearly composed with the utmost attention to each tiny detail, the immediacy of the performance makes the quartet sound prophetic and telepathic, with each player anticipating every small change as though guided by primitive spiritual sensation.

It’s an uncomfortable and inorganic record in these respects, and yet Wiese’s hand and mouth are not entirely inaudible. Gasps of human breath (or something similar – an asthma attack through a straw) scatter all over “Subfertile” like rodents, while humming strings allude to human error in their scraping, quivering imperfection. Even when “Elefant” takes the music to a state of unnatural panic – with the sounds of flying saucers and chopped up piano pieces – there are little passing thoughts of hip hop rhythms, tugging the piece out of its erratic abstraction and placing it within a spectrum of musical reference. It’s a record that hides its maker somewhere within its fragmentation and source-mashing collage, yet he’s still there somewhere – birthing sound and sustaining it, a mere shadow of a reflection initiating divine sonic intervention.

On first listen, Drop Diary could perhaps be seen as a rather loose adherence to the Mystery Sea label’s thematic basis (written as a poetic paragraph that alludes to the wonder and spirituality of the liquid state), but further inspection reveals that water it everywhere: seeping through the seams of Lamy’s desolate, low activity field recordings, screaming sibilance somewhere in the distance as a monolithic crash of waves, dripping and trickling onto objects. It’s as though the whole record was recorded on a floating platform in the ocean somewhere, leaving Lamy with not only a source of sonic instigation, but also an unavoidable, all-enveloping collaborator.

It’s a record of constant transition and complexity. Elements are always either fading in or out, with faint brushstrokes of ghostly synthesiser making way for clangs of dockyard bells, which pass incidental wooden knocks on their way through. Yet despite its fluid, ever-changing shape, Lamy does a wonderful job of retaining a mysterious and indefinable stasis – each track is an entity rather than a collage, and what could have become a disparate patchwork in the wrong hands feels like a single entity undergoing brisk, continuous evolution.

“Untitled” is like tracking a packet of binary information as it writhes across a network. One portion of the journey fades into the next – it slips through the metronomical beeps of cyber gateways and out into calamitous eruptions of white noise, forever surrounding by the chattering, morse code-esque signals whizzing past. At one point the electronic gives way to the sound of something wielding a circular saw in a snowstorm (all bitter distortion blasts and metallic, resonant shrieks) before fading out to reveal dead-air debris and feedback. It’s a more inevitable, undeviating journey than “nanoM+” to begin with, but it soon falls victim to the continual collapse that births the sudden directional shifts in the first half. A most interesting record, and one that seems to (unintentionally perhaps, but potently nonetheless) explore the introduction of chance, via questionable craftsmanship, into the seemingly formidable world of computerised information transfer.

Then the spitting powerchords of Dead C kick in, and the improvisatory free-flow crunches to a halt. Programmed drums and guitars slide across eachother like tectonic plates – grinding in sickening tempo mismatch – while vocals drawl somewhere in between; there’s the spirit of a song somewhere in “EUSA Kills”, although it’s deteriorated into rust and broken parts by the time it reaches this split. Elsewhere, ungated guitar hiss spills over volcanic purrs of noise, choked frets form angular spiderwebs cast across jaunty rimshots, loose feedback and distorted loops spray into the high frequencies like a firehose, as Dead C find perverse harmony in their confusion of ideas – a glorious sense of connection arises out of a chaotic, multi-directional heave, and there are points where the band sound both intimately engaged and lost to the world simultaneously. Great stuff on both sides, exploring virtuosic musicality on the first side and the power of self-imposed ineptitude on the second.

Perpetuating the sense of being cyclically trapped between two states, “White Noise” carries me on the most gargantuan pendulumic swing between its two bass notes, which tilt the track back and forth like a ship in a gentle dawn tide. When the low frequencies dissipate, it’s like the gravity has been ripped out from beneath – notes drift into eachother and collide as atonal sound clumps, stripped of purpose and direction and seeking solace in a dissonant aimlessness. It’s a more calculated composition than “Black Tie”, and where the first half of this release submits itself to the wondrous metaphysical beyond, the latter plays god with a galaxy of monolithic sonic planets.

In contrast, Left Hand Cuts Off The Right is a market place of sound – culturally undefined loops ripping at the seams, kalimba downpours, hand claps in a gymnasium, reverent wind chimes of feedback, accidental conversational clippings turned into infectious rhythms. It’s sometimes disturbing what one can collate into a musical whole. Where Bad Suburban Nightmare sounds painfully alone, LHCOTR is social to the point of sickness, dragging noises into begrudging (occasionally beautiful) company, like the grainy souvenirs of a geographically eclectic voyage forced to circulate on a merry-go-round until they trick themselves into enjoying it.

And so melodically, the album unravels and never looks back – each track is an eco-system in which each sound is a component of intimate interconnection and rippling consequence, with every small change (perhaps harmonically or dynamically) knocking into the surrounding elements and culminating in a much larger transformation. The vocals – which, for other artists at least, often offer the refuge of assertion in music of constant shift – sound as transient as the surrounding instruments, clinging desperately to each split-second as it happens, riding the waves of an eternally uncertain tide. Understandably, he sounds tentative – not whispering exactly, but exerting each word softly into the air, as though ready to retract each vocalization in the event that the current course of tonality is ruptured without warning.

Collings refers to a “reckoning with the destructive forces in my life” in his description of Splintered Instruments, the most explicit manifestation of which arrives in the first two tracks. Opener “Vasilia” is a turbulent mass of percussion (shakers, tambourines, large tom drums) that tugs the thick web of melody in every direction like an old wooden ship wrapped up in a relentless ocean storm. Meanwhile, “They Meet On The Subway” feels crisp and somewhat Scandinavian in its landscape – feet trudging through sodden fields, crystalised dew (gently tinkling chimes) melting away in the brisk winter-spring transition.

Gaps start to open up from here. Collings’ violent tendencies feel less cathartically applied, turning into ominous suggestion rather than all-out destruction – dark clouds of dissonance in the background, the collapse of individual instruments into ash. “Pneumonia Loves The Moon” bathes a forest in silver moonlight, with clarinets and double bass chatting in amongst penetrative beams of strings and the cautionary caw of crows. Collings’ preference for the organic in all its unpredictability is often most visible during these patches of quiet, with each instrument flecked with the scars of imperfection that the mechanical can never convincingly reproduce.

But it’s the post-production that pushes Sky Burial off the edge. While the players work to contort their instruments through bodily interaction – hammering on the ceiling of human endurance and capability – Cymerman’s studio processes tug the album beyond the limits of flesh and into the immensity of the abstract. Instrument timbres are smudged into strange shades by subtle applications of distortion or exaggerated frequency emphasis (resulting in some thunderous clunks of low end and intrusive breath sounds), while the more drastic transformations thrust open trapdoors into which entire soundscapes plummet all at once. Take the end of the title track, which seems to splinter under the collective ferocity of its players; occasional stammers of digital glitch intensify into a stuck loop of escalating volume, which eventually erupts in a devastating sub-bass black hole. Once again, we hear the results of a Plotkin mastering job that taps into visceral low frequencies that would turn to rumbling mush in lesser hands.

One of the most notable aspects of the album is its deliberate retainment of its core organic energy. Even during the most explosive points of collapse, during which fuzz and reverb dance in swirls of tornado panning, the sounds of woodwind and trumpet are still very much audible. Cymerman carefully reshapes rather than rendering sounds malformed beyond recognition; as such, the virtuosic abilities of Sky Burial’s key players are always very much on show. The album is an amplification of what’s already there – a primal exhibition of musical energy, propelled and exploded into the surreal by a very creative and twisted retrospective eye.