In 2023 the American violinist Austin Wulliman – best known for his membership of the essential contemporary ensemble, the Jack Quartet – added ‘composer’ to his résumé with his EP ‘The News from Utopia’ (Bright Shiny Things), and, in doing so, entered that special category of creative multihyphenates whose various hyphens are each genuinely worth bringing to public attention. From some elements of that debut, whose pieces all involved solely violin, Wulliman has fashioned his new string quartet album ‘Escape Rites’: a smart, focused collection of original works and one John Cage arrangement, all conveniently (and excellently) performed by the Jack Quartet.

String quartet-playing of Wulliman’s calibre might be inessential for string quartet-writing, but the composer’s experience on stage must certainly factor into his command of the form. Dense, justly intoned textures, unevenness, repetition and willowiness emerge as hallmarks of Wulliman’s style. As on his past EP, some of these works are sketched after retrofuturistic visions, articulated here in his fan-fiction-esque booklet note, whose protagonist navigates a wilderness ridden with rotting computer cables.

The Late Edition, a frenetic perpetual motion with an apparent debt to Steve Reich’s Different Trains, is the album’s first track but also its least distinctive. Matters improve in Lost One, the hypnotic, slow-moving work that follows, in which a woozy motif, carried forwards by pulses, drifts past us time and again, imparting a precarious sense of déjà vu with every repetition, as though the reflecting pool referenced in the booklet notes were in fact the river of Lethe.

Escape Rites, which follows, is fully the album’s centrepiece. In six attacca movements, Wulliman brews an erratically bubbling potion – a sense highlighted by his asymmetric deployment of pizzicato – from disparate styles and moods, all of which slosh unexpectedly yet cogently together. Sourced partly from an early work, Live News is a playful manifestation of broadcast transmission as jaunty clockwork and hissing electronics. For the road, we have a just intonation-flavoured bonbon: Wulliman’s arrangement of Cage’s prepared piano work Totem Ancestor, a strident (compared with the Kronos Quartet’s airier version – Nonesuch, 12/97) take on the piece composed for Merce Cunningham’s dance of the same name.