Ming Tsao is a Chinese American, born in 1966 and now professor of composition in Gothenburg. His teachers included Brian Ferneyhough, from whom he seems to have acquired a tendency to surround his works with impenetrable extra-musical baggage, which often belies the directness of the music itself. I'm still not clear what the string quartet Pathology of Syntax is "about", or how a poem by JH Prynne from which the title comes relates to what we hear; any more than the connection between the ensemble work (Un)cover and Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op 111 or between The Book of Virtual Transcriptions and Mozart's Oboe Quartet K370 seems essential information for understanding what, taken at face value, are rather strikingly spare works with little oases of quiet lyricism hidden among the tangled, fractured textures. The other pieces here reference a movie by Jean-Marie Straub, a collection of street observations by Walter Benjamin and Bach's Musical Offering, but I really don't think that information helps in getting to grips with them.