Graham Ross isn’t the first musician to have got Iceland under his skin – a process that, for many of us, is only magnified when we encounter the separatist music of this disorientating and fascinating country. With his Cambridge choir and his own chamber orchestra, he brings us a programme ‘bound together by the common relation [its] sound world bears to the timelessness of Iceland’s topography’.

Slow tempos? Check. Austere hymnody? Check. Drones, pedal notes and slow pitch-bending vocal glissandos? Well, just about – they’re most evident on the opening track, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s Ad genua, whose looping melody is prefaced by the tectonic creaking and snapping of current Icelandic fashion. This piece, in which the chorus responds to lonely incantations by a solo soprano (Carolyn Sampson), the whole stalked by rumbling percussion, is arguably the nearest we get to what’s musically interesting about Iceland in this compelling phase of its musical development. References to traditional hymns, meanwhile, provide useful Lutheran building blocks (Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson’s Heyr, himna smiur and Thorvaldsdóttir’s own arrangement of Heyr ú oss himnum á are the most telling of them).

Beyond that, we get the one piece by Jón Leifs in which the composer uses his uncompromising and abrasive technique to soothing effect, the Elegy, Op 53 (Hjálmar H Ragnarsson’s stunning Ave Maria transplants Leifs’s block-like diatonic shifts into a radiant context; a beautiful, integral piece excellently done here). The many minutes of music by Sigurur Sævarsson, meanwhile, bear little testament to the most current, progressive Icelandic musical trends with an aesthetic that can border on the schmaltzy; the Requiem is better than the Magnificat, its austerity speaking louder than the former piece’s popular harmonies (the ‘Lux aeterna’ is quite a moment).

I’m conscious of not wanting to project ‘my’ idea of the perfect musical snapshot of Iceland on to Ross’s own, which has other considerations – the tightness and luminosity of his choir and its fundamentally liturgical function, and perhaps even a few sales and streams (the disc closes with an arrangement of Sigur Rós’s ‘Fljótavík’). But even after a rather disjointed listening experience, the residual feeling here is of a warm bath, the smoothed cadences and sugar coatings concealing the true experience of a country that, beyond the Blue Lagoon, is cold, brutal, fortitudinous and uses its timelessness to create distinctive and forward-looking art – all of which has characterised Icelandic music from old psalmody to Björk. There’s just a taste of it here on an album whose music runs the gamut of fine to mediocre – and which, despite the title, has precious little of Iceland’s ‘eternal music’ on it.