Turnar is a glorious celebration of Hekla's creativity, technique and balance

What Magnúsdóttir achieves here is a remarkable combination of the theremin’s other-worldly sound (perhaps inevitably associated, rightly or wrongly, with a connotation of the futuristic) with a more classical sense of structural control and balance. The Janus-faced nature of the music is particularly well conveyed in tracks such as “Kyrrð”, with the eerie exploratory tones of the instrument beautifully complemented by the church organ playing of Kristján Hrannar.

This notion of an ecclesiastical accompaniment to the airy, spectral lightness is perhaps unsurprising in an album named after a ruined medieval castle tower. Yet the overall ambience is distinctly modern, and certainly far from any derivative pseudo-Gothic sonics; indeed, owing more to some post-War musical ideas of the kind heard in the wondrous secular-meets-sacred work composed by Morton Feldman for the opening of the Rothko Chapel.

The theremin’s soaring flights alongside the deep bass at the opening of side two is an extraordinarily arresting combination, and elsewhere Hekla’s own cello work provides its own counter to the vertiginous height of the theremin sonic, such that on tracks like “Ólga” what comes to mind is not just the gorgeous strangeness of the sounds but also more than a suggestion of a traditional feature of a classical quartet: a dialogue between instruments based on question and response on a record has both force and delicacy in its soundscape, and is a glorious achievement.