By my count this is the fifth complete recording of Brumel’s fabled 12-voice Earthquake Mass, so called because of the words associated with the seven-note cantus firmus that underpins it. (Since the last recording appeared, a newly discovered document establishes beyond reasonable doubt that Brumel wrote the Mass at Ferrara about 1507, most likely for the warlike Duke Alfonso I d’Este, whom his soldiers nicknamed ‘Il terremoto’ – ‘The Earthquake’). Whether any existing interpretation has yet fulfilled the potential of David Munrow’s account of the Gloria on his ‘The Art of the Netherlands’ anthology (11/76) is a moot point; but between them, these past interpretations free up a space for Graindelavoix’s avowedly ‘anti‑historicist’ stance.

The crux of the performance is the concluding Agnus Dei, which is incomplete due to the deterioration of the work’s only source. Nearly every recording resolves the problem differently. Björn Schmelzer chooses yet another approach: the gaps in the polyphony are not reconstructed but filled instead with new drone- and noise-based music from a group of wind instruments led by electric guitarist and composer Manuel Mota. These interventions permeate the entire recital, including a lengthy introduction and shorter interludes between (and bleeding into) the Mass movements. The result is an immersive experience of near-Stockhausenesque scope, largely successful on its own terms, with superlative playing and deft transitions between the Mass and the new materials.

But even those who accept those terms may regret the cavernous acoustic that so often obscures Brumel’s polyphony. To take just one example, whereas the ‘Christe’ is sufficiently slow for contrapuntal details to come through, the ensuing ‘Kyrie’ is taken so fast that one is left with not so much an earthquake as an alphabet soup of notes, a feeling compounded by the ensemble’s purposely loose approach to rhythm. As in all other available recordings, the tempos chosen pay scant regard to what is known of proportional relationships in this period, and the acoustic underlines the heterogeneous approach to tone, tuning (especially in the sopranos) and ensemble generally. (The more disciplined ‘Et incarnatus est’ of the Credo gives an idea what the Mass might sound like without the extraneous material.)

Space prevents me from considering the aesthetic positions Schmelzer adopts in the booklet-note interview but I cannot see how one can claim to be anti-historicist in one breath and invoke the composer’s intentions in the next. This is classic Graindelavoix, for better or worse, but with its trademark mannerisms integrated in a project that contextualises the violence (in a post-structuralist sense) done to Brumel.