The death of Fausto Romitelli in 2003 at the age of only 41 deprived contemporary music of a singular talent, one at ease working across a variety of media to effect their unexpected but powerful syntheses. An Index of Metals is his last piece – a ‘video opera’ and trial run for an ambitious project on texts by Georges Bataille that was never realised.

Not that Index is in any sense unambitious. Taking as its basis three vividly gestural poems by Croatian writer Kenka Lekovich, it brings together theatrical, instrumental and electronic elements in a provocative amalgam. From the Pink Floyd sample setting it in motion, the work unfolds as a treatment of these poems in which voice and ensemble are overlain by a complex mesh of electronic sound and given added impact through the menacing presence of electric guitar. These are interspersed with pungent electronic interludes that climax in a ricocheting ‘Adagio’ and eruptive ‘Finale’; a brief ‘Cadenza’ then discharging the accumulated sound-mass with giddying velocity. This recording presents the piece both as an audio-only format and in Paolo Pachini’s video realisation – less an accompaniment to than an opening-out of Romitelli’s explorations in timbre and texture, running the gamut from monochrome starkness to the dense interplay of abstract images, which duly set up a two-way commentary between sound and vision far beyond the pristine emptiness of most installation art.

The performance was recorded live then remixed, with the dynamism but also subtlety of Romitelli’s sonic imagination brought well within the confines of home listening, while the DVD presentation captures the immediacy of Pachini’s imagery. Visceral contributions from Donatienne Michel-Dansac and Ensemble Ictus and informative notes by Alessandro Arbo. Those who doubt the expressive intensity and sensual allure of such undertakings will need to think again.