This recording takes as its centrepiece one of Alexander Agricola’s most famous pieces, whose Latin title tells us that “a blind man cannot distinguish colours”. If the title is the composer’s (it’s weird enough), then his meaning may forever elude us, even if director Björn Schmelzer’s introductory essay (it’s long enough) has a valiant go at interpreting it. Schmeltzer uses Cecus’s two parts as bookends of an Agricola section; this is preceded by some of the finest pieces by his sometime colleague, Pierre de la Rue, and a lament for their employer, Philip the Fair; and followed by a motet mourning Agricola himself. It’s the first recording of a piece that looks slight on the page but is moving enough in performance. Whether it all hangs together as a programme I’m not entirely sure but it’s good of Graindelavoix to tackle some of the famous pieces of the time (Nymphes des bois and Absalon fili mi, whoever wrote it…) along with some obscure ones.

What I wrote last year of Graindelavoix’s previous recording mostly applies to this new disc, though the “Corsican monks” sonority is marginally toned down. The microtonal inflections remain and are applied with considerable taste. In Cecus, Schmelzer contrives to fill out the three voices so that a richer sound results. This is done without doing too much violence to the contrapuntal fabric, though the same can’t be said everywhere (try Si dedero). Voices or instruments on their own work well (Cecus and Je n’ay dueil, with its subtle asynchrony of parts, are in their way exceptional), but their combination can be maddening; and Schmelzers’s occasional fiddling about with pieces’ forms (as in La Rue’s Plorer, gemier) seems deliberately perverse; but in a disc with an Agricola theme, that’s perhaps appropriate…