MARTIN ADAMSreviews Crash Ensembleat the Project Arts Centre, Dublin

Kevin Volans – Nine Beginnings. Trumpet, vibe, cello, piano. Into Darkness. Jonathan Nangle – my heart skipped a thousand beats. Simon O’Connor – 60 Bars. Jennifer Walshe – i: same person/ii: not the same person.

Kevin Volans is 60 this year. In much of this celebratory concert, sound was pared to its bare essentials – a challenge which South African-born Volans has, for more than 30 years, been meeting in ways that are distinctively his.

In Jonathan Nangle's my heart stopped a thousand beats, cello and viola seem to breathe chords, slowly treading a space at once rich and minimal. Simon O'Connor's 60 barswas receiving its first performance. Slowly moving, almost a-rhythmic harmonies, with subtle tuning and pitch combinations, have the striking effect of making common chords seem as unsteady as dissonant ones.

Jennifer Walshe's i: the same person/ii: not the same personis an indescribable, cowboy-inspired soundscape.

The mingling of instrumental sounds, Walshe's virtuosic vocalisations, and her scraping an unangelic psaltery, are vivid and disturbing, as if the surface of High Plains Drifterwas stripped away, and the horror laid bare.

The three pieces that Kevin Volans chose might be described as early, middle and late. Nine Beginnings(1976, rev. 1985), played on keyboards by the composer and John Godfrey, strips harmony and rhythm down to a level that, when the work appeared, provoked outrage.

That fastidious ear and intellect are still at work in Trumpet, vibe, cello, piano, the third piece Volans has written for the Crash, and which was receiving its first performance. Minute changes of colour and pitch, and subtle metrical counterpoint, produce a work of fascinating, sparse beauty.

To this pair of ears, Into Darkness(1987) reveals the deep-rootedness of Volans's thinking. Written in the last weeks of his mother's life, it is, he says: "A slightly African sort of Totentanz."

Circles of ideas work tightly, with impeccable craft; and finally, it sounds as if the "Sacrificial Dance" from The Rite of Springhas become a beautiful, ghostly echo.